Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Clif Flynt, Sarath Lakshman, Shantanu Tushar
Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Clif Flynt, Sarath Lakshman, Shantanu Tushar

Overview of this book

The shell is the most powerful tool your computer provides. Despite having it at their fingertips, many users are unaware of how much the shell can accomplish. Using the shell, you can generate databases and web pages from sets of files, automate monotonous admin tasks such as system backups, monitor your system's health and activity, identify network bottlenecks and system resource hogs, and more. This book will show you how to do all this and much more. This book, now in its third edition, describes the exciting new features in the newest Linux distributions to help you accomplish more than you imagine. It shows how to use simple commands to automate complex tasks, automate web interactions, download videos, set up containers and cloud servers, and even get free SSL certificates. Starting with the basics of the shell, you will learn simple commands and how to apply them to real-world issues. From there, you'll learn text processing, web interactions, network and system monitoring, and system tuning. Software engineers will learn how to examine system applications, how to use modern software management tools such as git and fossil for their own work, and how to submit patches to open-source projects. Finally, you'll learn how to set up Linux Containers and Virtual machines and even run your own Cloud server with a free SSL Certificate from letsencrypt.org.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Merging multiple files as columns

The can command can be used to merge two files by row, one file after the other. Sometimes we need to merge two or more files side by side, joining the lines from file 1 with the lines from file 2.

How to do it...

The paste command performs column-wise concatenation:

    $ paste file1 file2 file3 ...

Here is an example:

    $ cat file1.txt
    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    $ cat file2.txt
    slynux
    gnu
    bash
    hack
    $ paste file1.txt file2.txt
    1 slynux
    2 gnu
    3 bash
    4 hack
    5

The default delimiter is tab. We can specify the delimiter with -d:

    $ paste file1.txt file2.txt -d ","
    1,slynux
    2,gnu
    3,bash
    4,hack
    5,
...