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

Summary


In this chapter, we discussed four text editing tools, divided into two types: GUI-based editors (Atom and Notepad++) and command-line editors  (Vim and GNU nano), before showing how to use these tools together.

Atom is a powerful text editor that can be configured exactly how you want . By default, it has support for many different coding languages, including shell. It also comes with Git and GitHub integration. We also briefly discussed Notepad++. While not as powerful as Atom, it is also suitable for our purposes, as it is basically an enhanced Notepad with all the important features for shell scripting.

 

 

 

 

Vim and nano are the two most popular Linux command-line text editors. We have learned that while Vim is very powerful, it is also harder to learn than nano. However, learning how to properly use Vim will speed up many things you do on a Linux system and is a very valuable skill to have. For a great hands-on introduction to Vim, go through the vimtutor. Nano is much easier to...