Book Image

Mastering Bash

By : Giorgio Zarrelli
Book Image

Mastering Bash

By: Giorgio Zarrelli

Overview of this book

System administration is an everyday effort that involves a lot of tedious tasks, and devious pits. Knowing your environment is the key to unleashing the most powerful solution that will make your life easy as an administrator, and show you the path to new heights. Bash is your Swiss army knife to set up your working or home environment as you want, when you want. This book will enable you to customize your system step by step, making your own real, virtual, home out of it. The journey will take you swiftly through the basis of the shell programming in Bash to more interesting and challenging tasks. You will be introduced to one of the most famous open source monitoring systems—Nagios, and write complex programs with it in any languages. You’ll see how to perform checks on your sites and applications. Moving on, you’ll discover how to write your own daemons so you can create your services and take advantage of inter-process communication to let your scripts talk to each other. So, despite these being everyday tasks, you’ll have a lot of fun on the way. By the end of the book, you will have gained advanced knowledge of Bash that will help you automate routine tasks and manage your systems.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Going dark with the daemon

Do you think doing daemons is a complex task? Yes it is, unless you use a nice utility called daemon. The task of this program is to daemonize other commands or script in a simple and neat way. Does this utility take any shortcuts? No, it just goes through all the steps we have already seen to detach a process from the controlling terminal, putting it in background, starting a new session, clearing the umask, and closing the old file descriptors. Well, doing it by ourselves in Bash coding will be quite a difficult task. This program makes everything straightforward, nothing to take care of manually. But there is a drawback: this is not a standard utility and must be installed by the user. Not a big issue indeed since many distributions such as Debian or Red Hat have a package for this utility.

Time to try this utility out, so let's take our write...