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 ...

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

The command-line interface (CLI) is the cornerstone of interacting with the Linux operating system. It allows users to enter commands directly, offering greater control and flexibility compared to ...

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 ...

This post follows up on Part 1 by examining the many ways that you can test the value of variables – e.g., whether they equal particular strings like “yes” or “no”, if they have a numeric value, if ...

Enable the Linux terminal on any Android device, and you can create or practice your bash scripting on the go.

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 ...

A software vendor has given us a script that sets some environmental variables. It needs to be run manually by cd-ing into the directory and executing '. ./.script.sh'. This seems a bit weird to me - ...