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)

Time for Safety

Safety is important, wherever we are. For example, in a construction site as in a newly built operating system, safety is a key factor to have things done the right way. Our shell is nothing different when it comes to safety: we spend most of our time inside our environment, trying to have things done, tasks running, and keep everything in order. This last chapter will give us some quick solutions and hints on how to strengthen it and preserve it from the most common issues using the shell. We will not use more advanced tools such as security or other kernel-level enhancement: such tools would require an entire book on their own, and they come after we clean up our shell. We will perform housekeeping, nothing really invasive, just a finishing touch, trying to find a balance between security, safety, and usability; and this is actually a hard goal: strengthen too...