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 ...

Bulky, assorted files filling up my Downloads folder are no more.

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 ...

Ever wondered why programming in Bash is so difficult? Bash employs the same constructs as traditional programming languages; however, under the hood, the logic is rather different. The Bourne-Again ...

Once a script is prepared and tested, you can get a significant task completed simply by typing the script's name followed by any required arguments. Developing scripts to handle your more complicated ...

Linux Journal, representing 25+ years of publication, is the original magazine of the global Open Source community.

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 ...

How a simple script can transform your desktop cleanup.

I recently switched to Mac OS X as my primary desktop operating system after spending over a decade on Linux. Although Apple’s operating system supplies practically all of the command line tools I ...

Shell scripting is one of those skills that are absolutely invaluable on especially UNIX and BSD-based systems like the BSDs, the two zillion Linux distributions as well as MacOS. Yet not every shell ...