Bash scripts are powerful, but with power comes great responsibility. It’s very easy for sloppy or poorly-planned code to do real damage, so it’s a good idea to be careful and practice defensive ...

In order to avoid this common mistake I often have my shell scripts prompt me for a yes or no answer before they proceed. The function described here is for doing that: asking a question and ...

Few aspects of Unix system administration are more intimate than the relationship between the admin and their chosen shell. After all, the shell is the most fundamental interface to the system, the ...

Here are steps you can take to ensure that your bash scripts work as intended and are easy to update. Committing routine and even rarely required tasks to scripts is almost always a big win because ...

If you use ALSA for sound on your system the functions contained in the script presented here can be used to get and set the volume on your system. You might use this if you had a monitoring script ...

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 ...

When a question like “How can a bash script tell you where it’s located?” pops into your head, it seems like it ought to be a very easy question to answer. We’ve got commands like pwd, but … pwd tells ...