B ash scripts are powerful, but with power comes great responsibility. It’s very easy for sloppy or poorly-planned code to do ...

I am involved in several free software projects, including one or two where I maintain the website. For one of those projects, we currently are updating the website. Ours is probably similar to other ...

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 ...

We often write quick bash scripts and judging by the comments, half of us use bash or a similar shell to pop out quick, useful scripts, and half of us think that’s an abomination, and you should only ...

Many bash scripts use arguments to control the commands that they will run and the information that will be provided to the people running them. This post examines a number of ways that you can verify ...

In our first tutorial on command line wizardry, we covered simple redirection and the basics of sed, awk, and grep. Today, we're going to introduce the concepts of simple variable substitution and ...

Bring your GitHub repository to the next level of functionality. For the past year since Microsoft has acquired GitHub, I've been hosting my Git repositories on a private server. Although I relished ...

This post follows up on Part 1 by examining the many ways that you can test the value of variables – e.g., whether they equal particular strings like “yes” or “no”, if they have a numeric value, if ...

Here's a secret you might not have known: you don't need advanced programming skills to write basic code, and learning how can make a massive difference in the way you use your computer. Anyone can do ...