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 ...

Check if a file is really a file, whether a string contains anything, and whether you can run a program with these vital patterns.

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...