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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Have you been thinking about biting the bullet and learning Bash scripting? Or perhaps you're like me, and you're always looking for ways to improve. I have three tips that will improve every Bash ...

We often read (including in the book Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper) that if we pass variable names as parameters to functions, they will be treated as string literals and cannot be ...

I've recently written about using bash arrays and bash regular expressions, so here's a more useful example of using them to test IP addresses for validity. To belabor the obvious: IP addresses are 32 ...

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 ...

FFmpeg was designed as a cross-platform solution for video and audio recording, conversion, and streaming. Its About page describes the command-line tool as “the leading multimedia framework, able to ...

Markdown has become an extremely popular way to document source code and other projects, thanks in no small part to how well web-based services like GitHub render it. Just sprinkle a few extra ...