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 ...

Techniques so absurdly simple, you'll curse all the code you wrote without them.

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 ...

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 ...

How a simple script can transform your desktop cleanup.

While Linux systems install with thousands of commands, bash also supplies a large number of “built-ins”—commands that are not sitting in the file system as separate files, but are part of bash itself ...

Have you ever dreamed of making a bash script that assembles Intel 8080 machine code? [Chris Smith] did exactly that when he created xa.sh, a cross-assembler written entirely in Bourne shell 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 ...

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 ...

Harness the power of bash and learn how to scrape websites for exciting new images every morning. So, you want a cool dynamic desktop wallpaper without dodgy programs and a million viruses? The good ...