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

Finding files


After learning about common file operations and archiving, there is one vital skill in file manipulation we have not yet covered: finding files. It's very neat that you know how to copy or archive files, but if you cannot find the file you want to manipulate, you're going to have a hard time completing your task. Fortunately, there are tools devoted to finding and locating files on a Linux filesystem. And, to keep things simple, these are called find and locate. The find command is more complex, but more powerful, while the locate command is easier to use when you know exactly what you're looking for. First, we'll show you how to use locate, before moving on to the more extensive capabilities of find.

locate

On the man page for locate, the description could not be more fitting: locate - find files by name. The locate command is installed by default on your Ubuntu machine and the basic functionality is as simple as using locate <filename>. Let's see how this works:

reader...