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 command-line editors


Being able to use command-line editors is a skill anyone working with Linux should learn sooner or later. For Linux installations with a GUI, this might be substituted with a GUI tool such as Atom or the distribution's built-in variant on Notepad. However, server installations will almost never have a GUI and you will have to rely on command-line text editors. While this might sound daunting, it's really not! To give you a small introduction to command-line editors, we'll go over two of the most popular applications that are present on most Linux distributions: Vim and GNU nano.

Vim

The first command-line text editor we will discuss is perhaps the most popular for Linux: Vim. Vim is derived from the term Vi Improved, as it is an updated clone of the Unix editor Vi. It was created and is still maintained by Bram Moolenaar, who first released Vim publicly in 1991. Vim (or, on very old systems, Vi) should be present on all Unix or Unix-like machines you will encounter...