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)

Understanding the basics of sed

Having built a little foundation, we can now start to look at some of the operations of sed. The commands will be supplied with most Linux systems and are core commands.

We will dive directly into some simple examples:

$ sed 'p' /etc/passwd  

The p operator will print the matched pattern. In this case, we have not specified a pattern so we will match everything. Printing the matched lines without suppressing STDOUT will duplicate lines. The result of this operation is to print all the lines in the passwd file twice. To print the modified lines only, we use the -n option:

$ sed -n 'p' /etc/passwd  

Brilliant!! We have just reinvented the cat command. We can now specifically work with just a range of lines:

$ sed -n '1,3 p ' /etc/passwd  

Now we have reinvented the head command, but we can also specify the range in a...