B ash scripts are powerful, but with power comes great responsibility. It’s very easy for sloppy or poorly-planned code to do ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This post follows up on Part 1 by examining the many ways that you can test the value of variables – e.g., whether they equal particular strings like “yes” or “no”, if they have a numeric value, if ...

In our first tutorial on command line wizardry, we covered simple redirection and the basics of sed, awk, and grep. Today, we're going to introduce the concepts of simple variable substitution and ...

Harness the power of bash and learn how to scrape websites for exciting new images every morning. So, you want a cool dynamic desktop wallpaper without dodgy programs and a million viruses? The good ...

I recently thought about writing a Groovy script to search JARs for a specific string, but decided to first look for an alternative rather than writing a script. The alternative needed to be easy to ...

$ cat </dev/tcp/time.nist.gov/13 55103 09-09-29 17:58:55 50 0 0 0.0 UTC(NIST) * Reads the time in Daytime Protocol (RFC-867) from the NIST Internet Time Service ...