Script Doctor While bash scripting is often maligned and not without reason, it is very flexible and powerful, as this example shows.

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 pres… ...

Many Linux-based machines run Bash as their standard scripting engine, but some distributions, like Alpine and Debian, don't. Testing your script with other shells can help with portability.

Jack Wallen shows how you can create a Linux shell script that requires a password without having to save a password within the script.

It's not hard to create and run a shell script in Linux distros like Ubuntu, but there are a few non-obvious pitfalls you need to avoid. Here's a quick example of how to execute a script in Linux.

In the final script, of course, you won't echo the entered password, as that's not so good from a privacy and security perspective. To test for length, it's easy to use wc -c, but there's a special ...