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 ...

Variables often look like $var, but they also look like $1, $*, $? and $$. Let's take a look at what all these $ values can tell you. A lot of important values are ...

Here are some basic skills to get started with bash, one of the best shells for preparing and using scripts on Linux. Scripting in Linux–putting commands into a file so you can run them as a group—is ...

Bulky, assorted files filling up my Downloads folder are no more.

We often read (including in the book Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper) that if we pass variable names as parameters to functions, they will be treated as string literals and cannot be ...

A software vendor has given us a script that sets some environmental variables. It needs to be run manually by cd-ing into the directory and executing '. ./.script.sh'. This seems a bit weird to me - ...

You need to package up a bunch of files, send them somewhere, and do something with them at the destination. It isn’t an uncommon scenario. The obvious answer is to create an archive — a zip or tar ...

Finally, I'm going to finish the mail merge script, just in time for Replicant Day. Oh, sorry, back to topic here. I was developing a shell script that would let you specify a text document with ...