The last of the basic building blocks of shell scripting are conditional statements, allowing you to decide programmatically whether to execute a block of statements based on a logical test, and flow ...

Every time we publish a Linux hack that uses a shell script, someone will chime in about how awful it is to program shell scripts. While we like the ubiquity and efficiency, we can’t disagree that the ...

Us geeks mostly think of the command line as the best place for text manipulation. It's a natural with cat, grep and shell scripts. But although you can't necessarily view your results from within a ...

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 ...

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 ...