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)

Creating filesystems with compression

The squashfs program creates a read-only, heavily compressed filesystem. The squashfs program can compress 2 to 3 GB of data into a 700 MB file. The Linux LiveCD (or LiveUSB) distributions are built using squashfs. These CDs make use of a read-only compressed filesystem, which keeps the root filesystem on a compressed file. The compressed file can be loopback-mounted to load a complete Linux environment. When files are required, they are decompressed and loaded into the RAM, run, and the RAM is freed.

The squashfs program is useful when you need a compressed archive and random access to the files. Completely decompressing a large compressed archive takes a long time. A loopback-mounted archive provides fast file access since only the requested portion of the archive is decompressed.

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