Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

Working with the shell is an efficient way to interact with your machine. With just a few lines of shell code, your machine can do exactly what you want it to do. What many people don’t realize is you can use shell scripts for many essential (and not so essential) tasks, in addition to managing your files and system operations.

This cookbook of useful, customizable, and fun shell scripts gives you tools to solve common problems and personalize your computing environment. Each section contains ready-to-use scripts and an explanation of how each script works, why you’d want to use it, and suggestions for changing and expanding it.

Save time and effort when working with files, maintaining your system, and managing your website with scripts like:
–An interactive spell checker that fixes spelling and typing errors in any document
–A disk backup utility that keeps your files safe in the event of a system crash
–Web logfile analysis tools that measure the traffic to your site, identify the most popular pages, and report any errors
–A weather tracker that reports the current temperature and UV Index, and info such as population and latitude and longitude
–Shell script games, including the old favorite, Hangman

Whether you want to save time managing your system or to find new ways to goof off, you’ll agree these scripts are wicked cool!

Dave Taylor has a Master’s degree in Education and an MBA. He has written over a dozen technical books, including Learning UNIX for Mac OS X (O’Reilly), Solaris for Dummies (Wiley), and Teach Yourself UNIX in 24 Hours (SAMS). He was a contributor to BSD 4.4 UNIX, and his software is included in many major UNIX distributions.