Book Image

Learn Linux Shell Scripting – Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

By : Sebastiaan Tammer
Book Image

Learn Linux Shell Scripting – Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

By: Sebastiaan Tammer

Overview of this book

Shell scripts allow us to program commands in chains and have the system execute them as a scripted event, just like batch files. This book will start with an overview of Linux and Bash shell scripting, and then quickly deep dive into helping you set up your local environment, before introducing you to tools that are used to write shell scripts. The next set of chapters will focus on helping you understand Linux under the hood and what Bash provides the user. Soon, you will have embarked on your journey along the command line. You will now begin writing actual scripts instead of commands, and will be introduced to practical applications for scripts. The final set of chapters will deep dive into the more advanced topics in shell scripting. These advanced topics will take you from simple scripts to reusable, valuable programs that exist in the real world. The final chapter will leave you with some handy tips and tricks and, as regards the most frequently used commands, a cheat sheet containing the most interesting flags and options will also be provided. After completing this book, you should feel confident about starting your own shell scripting projects, no matter how simple or complex the task previously seemed. We aim to teach you how to script and what to consider, to complement the clear-cut patterns that you can use in your daily scripting challenges.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction
Index

Archiving


Now that we have a grasp on common file operations in Linux, we'll move on to archiving. While it might sound fancy, archiving refers simply to creating archives. An example most of you will be familiar with is creating a ZIP file, which is an archive. ZIP is not Windows-specific; it is an archive file format with different implementations for Windows, Linux, macOS, and so on.

As you might expect, there are many archive file formats. On Linux, the most commonly used is the tarball, which is created by using the tar command (which is derived from the term tape archive). A tarball file, which ends in .tar, is uncompressed. In practice, tarballs will almost always be compressed with Gzip, which stands for GNU zip. This can be done either directly with the tar command (most common) or afterwards using the gzip command (less common, but can be used to compress files other than tarballs as well). Since tar is a complicated command, we'll explore the most commonly used flags in more detail...