Book Image

Mastering Linux Shell Scripting - Second Edition

By : Mokhtar Ebrahim, Andrew Mallett
5 (1)
Book Image

Mastering Linux Shell Scripting - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Mokhtar Ebrahim, Andrew Mallett

Overview of this book

In this book, you’ll discover everything you need to know to master shell scripting and make informed choices about the elements you employ. Grab your favorite editor and start writing your best Bash scripts step by step. Get to grips with the fundamentals of creating and running a script in normal mode, and in debug mode. Learn about various conditional statements' code snippets, and realize the power of repetition and loops in your shell script. You will also learn to write complex shell scripts. This book will also deep dive into file system administration, directories, and system administration like networking, process management, user authentications, and package installation and regular expressions. Towards the end of the book, you will learn how to use Python as a BASH Scripting alternative. By the end of this book, you will know shell scripts at the snap of your fingers and will be able to automate and communicate with your system with keyboard expressions.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)

Pythonic arguments

We should know by now that we will want to pass command-line arguments to Python and we can do this using the argv array. However, we are more like bash; with Python we combine the program name into the array with the other arguments.

Python also uses lowercase instead of uppercase in the object name:

  • The argv array is a part of the sys object
  • sys.argv[0] is the script name
  • sys.argv[1] is the first argument supplied to the script
  • sys.argv[2] is the second supplied argument and so on
  • The argument count will always be at least 1, so, keep this in mind when checking for supplied arguments