Book Image

Learn Linux Shell Scripting – Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

By : Sebastiaan Tammer
Book Image

Learn Linux Shell Scripting – Fundamentals of Bash 4.4

By: Sebastiaan Tammer

Overview of this book

Shell scripts allow us to program commands in chains and have the system execute them as a scripted event, just like batch files. This book will start with an overview of Linux and Bash shell scripting, and then quickly deep dive into helping you set up your local environment, before introducing you to tools that are used to write shell scripts. The next set of chapters will focus on helping you understand Linux under the hood and what Bash provides the user. Soon, you will have embarked on your journey along the command line. You will now begin writing actual scripts instead of commands, and will be introduced to practical applications for scripts. The final set of chapters will deep dive into the more advanced topics in shell scripting. These advanced topics will take you from simple scripts to reusable, valuable programs that exist in the real world. The final chapter will leave you with some handy tips and tricks and, as regards the most frequently used commands, a cheat sheet containing the most interesting flags and options will also be provided. After completing this book, you should feel confident about starting your own shell scripting projects, no matter how simple or complex the task previously seemed. We aim to teach you how to script and what to consider, to complement the clear-cut patterns that you can use in your daily scripting challenges.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Title Page
About Packt
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Introduction
Index

Summary


We started this final chapter with general tips and tricks. This part of the chapter dealt with arrays, the history command, and the ability to use alias to set up aliases for your favorite commands and their flags.

We continued with keyboard shortcuts. We started that part by talking about exclamation marks and how versatile their use can be in Bash: it is used for negation of exit codes, substituting parts of previous commands, and even for running commands from history by matching either the line number or line content. After that, we showed how a few interesting keyboard shortcuts for Bash allow us to save some time on common operations and usage patterns (such as typos and forgotten intermediate commands). We saved the best keyboard shortcut for last: reverse searches. These allow you to interactively go through your personal history to find just the right command to execute again.

We ended this chapter and the book with a cheat sheet for most of the commands we introduced in...