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)

Iterations

What we have seen so far enables us to interact with the user, process the input, and provide some output based on conditions we imposed. All of this is fine; and if the user calls our scripts with some arguments, we can store them in an array and process given that we know how many options they are passing to the command line. We must know in advance how many items the user will provide us with, otherwise we will lose those in excess. This is where an iterative construct comes in play. Since we already saw some examples, it can enumerate the content of an array and let us process its content without knowing in advance the number of items stored. In this chapter, we will have a look at how to use the for loop and while/until loop to get a strong grip on the data the user provides us with.