Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Fast command-line navigation using pushd and popd


When dealing with multiple locations on a terminal or shell prompt, our common practice is to copy and paste the paths. However, this is ineffective when there is only command-line access without a GUI. For example, if we are dealing with locations /var/www, /home/slynux, and /usr/src, when we need to navigate to these locations one by one, it is really difficult to type the path every time when we need to switch between the paths. Hence, the command-line interface (CLI) based navigation techniques such as pushd and popd are used. Let us see how to use them in this recipe.

Getting ready

pushd and popd are used to switch between multiple directories without the copying and pasting of directory paths. pushd and popd operate on a stack. We know that a stack is a last in first out (LIFO) data structure. It will store the directory paths in a stack and switch between them using the push and pop operations.

How to do it...

We omit the use of the cd...