Once you’ve gained a solid understanding of Linux and mastered the various commands available, your next big win comes in the form of shell functions. Code wrapped in a function can be reused by your ...

The first software that I was actually paid to develop was a 2-page shell script that prompted the user for a dozen or so pieces of information, before launching a set of cooperating processes. Those ...

Simply put, a Shell Script is a program that is run by a UNIX/Linux shell. It is a file that contains a series of commands which are executed sequentially as if they were entered on the command line ...

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 ...

Are you familiar with Huffman encoding? That’s where you pick shorter codes for more frequent letters. Morse code is the same way, in that the most-used letters are the shortest. [Matheus Richard] had ...

If you don't love the shell you're using on your Linux system, change it! There are plenty, including bash, fish, ksh, tcsh, zsh. There are quite a few shells on Linux system and more that can be ...

This article is reprinted from the book A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming 3rd edition, with permission of the author and publisher ...