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)

Counting directories and files

We can use a simple for loop to iterate over folder content and use an if statement to check whether the path is a directory or a file:

#!/bin/bash 
for path in /home/likegeeks/* 
do 
   if [ -d "$path" ] 
   then 
         echo "$path is a directory" 
   elif [ -f "$path" ] 
   then 
         echo "$path is a file" 
   fi 
done 

This is pretty straightforward script. We iterate over directory content and then we use an if statement to check whether the path is a directory or a file. Finally, we print beside each path whether it's a file or a directory.

We used quotes for the path variable because the file could contain a space.