Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Bootcamp

By : James K Lewis
Book Image

Linux Shell Scripting Bootcamp

By: James K Lewis

Overview of this book

Linux Shell Scripting Bootcamp is all about learning the essentials of script creation, validating parameters, and checking for the existence of files and other items needed by the script. We will use scripts to explore iterative operations using loops and learn different types of loop statements, with their differences. Along with this, we will also create a numbered backup script for backup files. Further, you will get well-versed with how variables work on a Linux system and how they relate to scripts. You’ll also learn how to create and call subroutines in a script and create interactive scripts. The most important archive commands, zip and tar, are also discussed for performing backups. Later, you will dive deeper by understanding the use of wget and curl scripts and the use of checksum and file encryption in further chapters. Finally, you will learn how to debug scripts and scripting best practices that will enable you to write a great code every time! By the end of the book, you will be able to write shell scripts that can dig data from the web and process it efficiently.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Linux Shell Scripting Bootcamp
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
Index

Find and use a good text editor


If you only occasionally write scripts or programs then vi is probably good enough for you. However, if you get into some real in depth programming, be it in Bash, C, Java, or some other language you should very definitely check out some of the other text editors that are available on Linux. You will almost certainly become more productive.

As I mentioned before, I have been working with computers for a really long time. I started out using an editor on DOS called Edlin and it was pretty weak (but still better than punch cards). I eventually moved on and started using vi on AIX (IBM's version of UNIX). I got pretty good at using vi since we didn't have any other options yet. As time went on other choices became available and I started using the IBM Personal Editors. These were really easy to use, more efficient than vi, and had many more features. As I did more and more programming, I found that none of these editors could do everything I wanted and so I wrote...