Variables often look like $var, but they also look like $1, $*, $? and $$. Let's take a look at what all these $ values can tell you. A lot of important values are ...

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 ...

Here are some basic skills to get started with bash, one of the best shells for preparing and using scripts on Linux. Scripting in Linux–putting commands into a file so you can run them as a group—is ...

The command-line interface (CLI) is the cornerstone of interacting with the Linux operating system. It allows users to enter commands directly, offering greater control and flexibility compared to ...

Bulky, assorted files filling up my Downloads folder are no more.

We often read (including in the book Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper) that if we pass variable names as parameters to functions, they will be treated as string literals and cannot be ...

A software vendor has given us a script that sets some environmental variables. It needs to be run manually by cd-ing into the directory and executing '. ./.script.sh'. This seems a bit weird to me - ...

If you are a traditional programmer, using bash for scripting may seem limiting sometimes, but for certain tasks, bash can be very productive. It turns out, some of the limits of bash are really ...

Bash, aka the Bourne-Again Shell, has a newly discovered security hole. And, for many Unix or Linux Web servers, it's a major problem. The flaw involves how Bash evaluates environment variables. With ...