Book Image

Mastering Bash

By : Giorgio Zarrelli
Book Image

Mastering Bash

By: Giorgio Zarrelli

Overview of this book

System administration is an everyday effort that involves a lot of tedious tasks, and devious pits. Knowing your environment is the key to unleashing the most powerful solution that will make your life easy as an administrator, and show you the path to new heights. Bash is your Swiss army knife to set up your working or home environment as you want, when you want. This book will enable you to customize your system step by step, making your own real, virtual, home out of it. The journey will take you swiftly through the basis of the shell programming in Bash to more interesting and challenging tasks. You will be introduced to one of the most famous open source monitoring systems—Nagios, and write complex programs with it in any languages. You’ll see how to perform checks on your sites and applications. Moving on, you’ll discover how to write your own daemons so you can create your services and take advantage of inter-process communication to let your scripts talk to each other. So, despite these being everyday tasks, you’ll have a lot of fun on the way. By the end of the book, you will have gained advanced knowledge of Bash that will help you automate routine tasks and manage your systems.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Coprocesses

Introduced with Bash 4.0, the coproc keyword allow allows the user to run a process in the background in an asyncronous subshell. During the execution of the process, a pipe is established between the calling shell and the coprocess. The best results are obtained with programs which can be run in a CLI and can read from stdin and write to stdout, better if with an unbuffered stream. The syntax for coprocess is here:

coproc (NAME) command (redirections)

The bits within parentheses are optional, but if you specify a name, coproc will create a coprocess with the name. If no name is given, it will be defaulted to COPROC; and we must not define any name if the following is a simple command, otherwise it will be treated as the first word of the command. The process ID of the shell executing the coprocess is stored in a variable called NAME_PID:

Let's see an example...