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)

What if...else

Let's take one of our previous examples and examine it in more detail:

#!/bin/bash    
echo "Hello user, please give me a number between 10 and 20: "
read user_input
if [ ${user_input} -ge 10 ] && [ ${user_input} -le 20 ]
then
echo "Great! The number ${user_input} is what we were looking for!"
else
echo "The number ${user_input} is not what we are looking for..."
fi

As an exercise to ease its comprehension, let's try to write it in natural language:

  1. Print a greeting asking for a number between 10 and 20
  2. Read the user input and save it in the user_input variable
  3. If the value of user_input is greater or equal to 10 and the value of user_input is less or equal to 2, then print an OK message to the user
  1. Otherwise (else), if the conditions are not met, print a not OK message
  2. Fi, end of condition

These are the basics of a...