Book Image

Command Line Fundamentals

By : Vivek Nagarajan
Book Image

Command Line Fundamentals

By: Vivek Nagarajan

Overview of this book

The most basic interface to a computer—the command line—remains the most flexible and powerful way of processing data and performing and automating various day-to-day tasks. Command Line Fundamentals begins by exploring the basics, and then focuses on the most common tool, the Bash shell (which is standard on all Linux and iOS systems). As you make your way through the book, you'll explore the traditional Unix command-line programs as implemented by the GNU project. You'll also learn to use redirection and pipelines to assemble these programs to solve complex problems. By the end of this book, you'll have explored the basics of shell scripting, allowing you to easily and quickly automate tasks.
Table of Contents (6 chapters)

Summary

In this chapter, we have learned about various concepts that let us use the command line in more advanced ways. These advanced features become very useful when writing shell scripts, which let us automate command-line tasks.

The complete set of shell commands and mechanisms is equivalent to a full-fledged programming language. A program written in the shell language is called a shell script. Unlike any other programming language, shell scripts can use or automate any other program that's available on the system to process data.

In the next chapter, we will learn how to write shell scripts so that a complex task can be written out once and repeated whenever necessary.