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)

Background processes

Let's start with an intuitive definition of a background process, and define it as a process with no interaction with the terminal it is launched from. This practically means that a background process has no interaction with the user and that's it. Technically, we can say that a background process is the one whose process ID group differs from the one of the terminal it has been launched from. We can define a process group as a bunch of processes sharing the same process group ID, which is an identifier allowing the system to manage all the processes as a whole. A process group ID is determined by the process ID of the first process of the group, also called process group leader; each subsequent process in the group will be the process group ID drawn from the process ID of the leader; and each child process is placed in the process group ID of its...