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)

Introducing functions

Functions are blocks of code that exist in memory as named elements. These elements can be created within the shell environment, as well as within the script execution. When a command is issued at the command line, aliases are checked first and, following this, we check for a matching function name. To display the functions residing in your shell environment, you can use the following command:

$ declare -F  

The output will vary depending on the distribution you are using and the number of functions you have created. On my Linux Mint, the partial output is shown in the following screenshot:

Using the small -f option, you can display the function and the associated definition. However, if we want to see just a single function definition, we can use the type command:

$ type quote  

The previous code example will display the code block for the quote function...