If you often find yourself writing scripts from scratch when you know you wrote something similar not all that long ago, maybe it’s time to make your scripts a bit more reusable. The usefulness of an ...

Imagine that you want to output multiple lines of text in Bash, or any shell script. Maybe it’s for a help string for a particularly convoluted shell script you’re writing. You could have a separate ...

Each Linux command returns an exit code, with 0 indicating success and non-zero values indicating failure. You can use the $? variable to access the exit code and control program flow in scripts. Be ...

We've spent the last three columns talking about the basic nuts and bolts of shell script programming, so I think it's time to start digging into a real shell script, and build something interesting ...

If you ever think about it, computers are exceedingly stupid. Even the most powerful CPU can’t do very much. However, it can do what it does very rapidly and repeatably. Computers are so fast, they ...

I've been hacking around with some Linux shell scripts for a project that are derived from existing, known good scripts. I'm using Ubuntu on WSL. The original scripts are nested, and a common pattern ...

For Linux users, the command line is a celebrated part of our entire experience. Unlike other popular operating systems, where the command line is a scary proposition for all but the most experienced ...

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 ...