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


This chapter described file manipulation in Linux. We started with common file operations. We explained how to we can copy files in Linux with cp and how we can move or rename files with mv. Next, we discussed how we can remove files and directories with rm and how we can create shortcuts under Linux with symbolic links by using the ln -s command.

In the second part of this chapter, we discussed archiving. While there are many different tools that allow archiving, we focused on the most commonly used one in Linux: tar. We showed you how to create and extract archives, both in the current working directory and to somewhere else on the filesystem. We described that both files and whole directories can be archived by tar, and that we can see what's inside a tarball without actually extracting it by using the -t option.

We ended this chapter with finding files using file and locate. We explained that locate is a simple command that is useful under certain circumstances, while find is a...