Oh happy day! I got an e-mail from a reader with a shell script question that didn't appear to be homework from a programming class or anything to do with hacking passwords. The reader wrote: I am ...

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

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 ...

How a simple script can transform your desktop cleanup.

Regarding the ability to create a double-clickable Terminal script (see previous item), Scott Lahteine notes that: AppleScript Menu can do more than just run AppleScripts. It allows you to run Perl ...

A file of executable commands for Unix and Linux. Created in a text editor, when the file is run, each command is executed until the end of the file is reached. After the shell script is written, it ...

We have the user-friendly AppleScript and now Automator. But long before either of these existed, there were shell scripts —series of Unix commands saved as mini-programs. By learning how to write ...

Scripts are part of the foundation for efficient network administration. Network administrators are generally not programmers, but they need tools that will let them automate certain tasks and ...

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

It used to be one of the joys of writing embedded software was never having to deploy shell scripts. But now with platforms like the Raspberry Pi becoming very common, Linux shell scripts can be a big ...