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

Using graphical editors for shell scripting


Tooling has come a long way since the first Unix and Unix-like distributions. In the earliest days, writing shell scripts was significantly harder than today: the shells were less powerful, text editors were command-line only and things such as syntax highlighting and autocomplete were non-existent. Today, we have very powerful GUI editors that will help us in our scripting adventures. Why would we want to wait until we run a script to find an error, when a GUI editor could have already shown us the error in advance? Today, using an advanced editor for shell scripting is almost a necessity that we wouldn't want to live without.

We'll describe two text editors in the coming pages: Atom and Notepad++. Both are GUI-based, which we can use for efficient shell scripting. If you have a preference for either already, pick that one. If you're unsure, we would recommend using Atom.

Atom

The first graphical editor we will consider is Atom, made by GitHub. It...