Ever wondered why programming in Bash is so difficult? Bash employs the same constructs as traditional programming languages; however, under the hood, the logic is rather different. The Bourne-Again ...

Once a script is prepared and tested, you can get a significant task completed simply by typing the script's name followed by any required arguments. Developing scripts to handle your more complicated ...

I really have too many tray icons. You know the ones. They sit on your taskbar, perhaps doing something in the background or, ...

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If you're not yet comfortable with writing scripts on Unix and Linux systems, this post might get you off to a healthy start. Creating a script on a Unix or Linux system can be dead easy or ...

If you're writing a Bash script, you will invariably need to pass values to it—aka arguments or positional parameters. Bash's approach is a little clunky, but it works. Examples are the easiest way to ...

The printf command offers well-defined behavior following the POSIX standard, which means it works the same way across shells ...

This article is reprinted from the book A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming 3rd edition, with permission of the author and publisher ...

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 ...