Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition

Don't neglect the shell - this book will empower you to use simple commands to perform complex tasks. Whether you're a casual or advanced Linux user, the cookbook approach makes it all so brilliantly accessible and, above all, useful.

Overview

• Master the art of crafting one-liner command sequence to perform text processing, digging data from files, backups to sysadmin tools, and a lot more
• And if powerful text processing isn't enough, see how to make your scripts interact with the web-services like Twitter, Gmail
• Explores the possibilities with the shell in a simple and elegant way - you will see how to effectively solve problems in your day to day life

In Detail

The shell remains one of the most powerful tools on a computer system — yet a large number of users are unaware of how much one can accomplish with it. Using a combination of simple commands, we will see how to solve complex problems in day to day computer usage.

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easy when working with the shell. The book shows the reader how to effectively use the shell to accomplish complex tasks with ease.

The book discusses basics of using the shell, general commands and proceeds to show the reader how to use them to perform complex tasks with ease.

Starting with the basics of the shell, we will learn simple commands with their usages allowing us to perform operations on files of different kind. The book then proceeds to explain text processing, web interaction and concludes with backups, monitoring and other sysadmin tasks.

Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook, Second Edition serves as an excellent guide to solving day to day problems using the shell and few powerful commands together to create solutions.

What you will learn from this book

• Explore a variety of regular usage tasks and how it can be made faster using shell command
• Write shell scripts that can dig data from web and process it with few lines of code
• Use different kinds of tools together to create solutions
• Interact with simple web API from scripts
• Perform and automate tasks such as automating backups and restore with archiving tools
• Create and maintain file/folder archives, compression formats and encrypting techniques with shell
• Set up Ethernet and Wireless LAN with the shell script
• Monitor different activities on the network using logging techniques

Approach

This book is written in a Cookbook style and it offers learning through recipes with examples and illustrations. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions about everything necessary to execute a particular task. The book is designed so that you can read it from start to end for beginners, or just open up any chapter and start following the recipes as a reference for advanced users.

Who this book is written for

This book is both for the casual GNU/Linux users who want to do amazing things with the shell, and for advanced users looking for ways to make their lives with the shell more productive.

You can start writing scripts and one-liners by simply looking at the similar recipe and its descriptions without any working knowledge of shell scripting or Linux. Intermediate/advanced users as well as system administrators/ developers and programmers can use this book as a reference when they face problems while coding.

Shantanu Tushar

Shantanu Tushar is an advanced GNU/Linux user since his college days. He works as an application developer and contributes to the software in the KDE projects.

Shantanu has been fascinated by computers since he was a child, and spent most of his high school time writing C code to perform daily activities. Since he started using GNU/Linux, he has been using shell scripts to make the computer do all the hard work for him. He also takes time to visit students at various colleges to introduce them to the power of Free Software, including its various tools. Shantanu is a well-known contributor in the KDE community and works on Calligra, Gluon and the Plasma subprojects. He looks after maintaining Calligra Active – KDE's office document viewer for tablets, Plasma Media Center, and the Gluon Player. One day, he believes, programming will be so easy that everybody will love to write programs for their computers.

Shantanu can be reached by e-mail on shantanu@kde.org, shantanutushar on identi.ca/twitter, or his website http://www.shantanutushar.com.

Sarath Lakshman

Sarath Lakshman is a 23 year old who was bitten by the Linux bug during his teenage years. He is a software engineer working in ZCloud engineering group at Zynga, India. He is a life hacker who loves to explore innovations. He is a GNU/Linux enthusiast and hactivist of free and open source software. He spends most of his time hacking with computers and having fun with his great friends. Sarath is well known as the developer of SLYNUX (2005)—a user friendly GNU/Linux distribution for Linux newbies. The free and open source software projects he has contributed to are PiTiVi Video editor, SLYNUX GNU/Linux distro, Swathantra Malayalam Computing, School-Admin, Istanbul, and the Pardus Project. He has authored many articles for the Linux For You magazine on various domains of FOSS technologies. He had made a contribution to several different open source projects during his multiple Google Summer of Code projects. Currently, he is exploring his passion about scalable distributed systems in his spare time. Sarath can be reached via his website http://www.sarathlakshman.com.