Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

By : Clif Flynt, Sarath Lakshman, Shantanu Tushar
Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

By: Clif Flynt, Sarath Lakshman, Shantanu Tushar

Overview of this book

The shell is the most powerful tool your computer provides. Despite having it at their fingertips, many users are unaware of how much the shell can accomplish. Using the shell, you can generate databases and web pages from sets of files, automate monotonous admin tasks such as system backups, monitor your system's health and activity, identify network bottlenecks and system resource hogs, and more. This book will show you how to do all this and much more. This book, now in its third edition, describes the exciting new features in the newest Linux distributions to help you accomplish more than you imagine. It shows how to use simple commands to automate complex tasks, automate web interactions, download videos, set up containers and cloud servers, and even get free SSL certificates. Starting with the basics of the shell, you will learn simple commands and how to apply them to real-world issues. From there, you'll learn text processing, web interactions, network and system monitoring, and system tuning. Software engineers will learn how to examine system applications, how to use modern software management tools such as git and fossil for their own work, and how to submit patches to open-source projects. Finally, you'll learn how to set up Linux Containers and Virtual machines and even run your own Cloud server with a free SSL Certificate from letsencrypt.org.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Finding symbolic links and their targets

Symbolic links are common in Unix-like systems. Reasons for using them range from convenient access, to maintaining multiple versions of the same library or program. This recipe will discuss the basic techniques for handling symbolic links.

Symbolic links are pointers to other files or folders. They are similar in function to aliases in MacOS X or shortcuts in Windows. When symbolic links are removed, it does not affect the original file.

How to do it...

The following steps will help you handle symbolic links:

  1. To create a symbolic link run the following command:
        $ ln -s target symbolic_link_name

 Consider this example:

        $ ln -l -s /var/www/ ~/web

 This creates a symbolic link (called web) in the...