It is easy to dismiss bash — the typical Linux shell program — as just a command prompt that allows scripting. Bash, however, is a full-blown programming language. I wouldn’t presume to tell you that ...

Skip one-click backup apps. This rsync script gives you full control over what gets saved and when, plus logs and a few hard-won lessons.

Linux, known for its robustness and flexibility, has been a favorite among developers, system administrators, and technology enthusiasts. One of the pillars of Linux's capabilities is its inherent ...

If you're not yet comfortable with writing scripts on Unix and Linux systems, this post might get you off to a healthy start. Creating a script on a Unix or Linux system can be dead easy or ...

A recent post about debugging constructs surprised me. There were quite a few comments about how you didn’t need a debugger, as long as you had printf. For that matter, we’ve all debugged systems ...

While Linux systems install with thousands of commands, bash also supplies a large number of “built-ins”—commands that are not sitting in the file system as separate files, but are part of bash itself ...

The first software that I was actually paid to develop was a 2-page shell script that prompted the user for a dozen or so pieces of information, before launching a set of cooperating processes. Those ...

How to use a Bash script for-loop for system administration in Linux Your email has been sent Bash scripting remains a staple of my endeavors in Linux as a system administrator, and I use it every day ...

The printf command offers well-defined behavior following the POSIX standard, which means it works the same way across shells and systems. Where echo often fails with escape sequences, printf handles ...