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 ...

Using a function in bash allows you to create something in Linux that works as if it were a script within a script. Whenever the data being processed matches a set of conditions, your script can call ...

In order to avoid this common mistake I often have my shell scripts prompt me for a yes or no answer before they proceed. The function described here is for doing that: asking a question and ...

Most people tend to encounter shell scripts as attempts to write portable utilities that run properly on most, if not all, UNIX workalikes. Instead of making the best use of the shell and related ...

Using RH7.0, I've set up a bash script called 'dlist' which is just an 'ls' with the '-s and -h' switches appended. This gives you your normal ls output, with total size of the directory contents and ...

I'm tweaking this script, and I'm having a lot of trouble testing my changes. It seems like my shell, Bash, is not respecting whitespace. Could someone help ...

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 ...

If you are a traditional programmer, using bash for scripting may seem limiting sometimes, but for certain tasks, bash can be very productive. It turns out, some of the limits of bash are really ...