Book Image

Learn Linux Quickly

By : Ahmed AlKabary
Book Image

Learn Linux Quickly

By: Ahmed AlKabary

Overview of this book

Linux is one of the most sought-after skills in the IT industry, with jobs involving Linux being increasingly in demand. Linux is by far the most popular operating system deployed in both public and private clouds; it is the processing power behind the majority of IoT and embedded devices. Do you use a mobile device that runs on Android? Even Android is a Linux distribution. This Linux book is a practical guide that lets you explore the power of the Linux command-line interface. Starting with the history of Linux, you'll quickly progress to the Linux filesystem hierarchy and learn a variety of basic Linux commands. You'll then understand how to make use of the extensive Linux documentation and help tools. The book shows you how to manage users and groups and takes you through the process of installing and managing software on Linux systems. As you advance, you'll discover how you can interact with Linux processes and troubleshoot network problems before learning the art of writing bash scripts and automating administrative tasks with Cron jobs. In addition to this, you'll get to create your own Linux commands and analyze various disk management techniques. By the end of this book, you'll have gained the Linux skills required to become an efficient Linux system administrator and be able to manage and work productively on Linux systems.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)

Reading user input

Let's create a better version of our hello.sh script. We will let the user input his/her name and then we will greet the user; create a script named greet.sh with the following lines:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ cat greet.sh 
#!/bin/bash

echo "Please enter your name:"
read name

echo "Hello $name!"

Now make the script executable and then run it:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ chmod a+x greet.sh 
elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ ./greet.sh
Please enter your name:

When you run the script, it will prompt you to enter your name; I entered Elliot as my name:

elliot@ubuntu-linux:~$ ./greet.sh 
Please enter your name:
Elliot
Hello Elliot!

The script greeted me with "Hello Elliot!". We used the read command to get the user input, and notice in the echo statement, we used a dollar sign, $, to print the value of the variable name.

Let's create another script that reads a filename from the user and then outputs the size of the file in bytes; we will name our script size...