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 ...

Few aspects of Unix system administration are more intimate than the relationship between the admin and their chosen shell. After all, the shell is the most fundamental interface to the system, the ...

This Wiley Publishing tome is big (more than 650 pages), useful and very complete. Be warned, however, that its scope is limited to system administration. The purpose of the book is to solve “real ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Using RH7.0, I've set up a bash script called 'dlist' which is just an 'ls' with the '-s and -h' switches appended. This gives you your normal ls output, with total size of the directory contents and ...