When you test a script and see it’s exited with a return code of 3, you will easily be able to identify the commands that were being run when the script failed. Use the longer spelled out options on ...

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 ...

Attaching a remote drive or directory on a Windows box is called “drive mapping” though the process is essentially the same as what we call mounting in the Unix world. While I rarely spend any ...

While Linux systems install with thousands of commands, bash also supplies a large number of “built-ins”—commands that are not sitting in the file system as separate files, but are part of bash itself ...

One of the most convenient ways to manipulate information in scripts is to store it in an array. Arrays facilitate looping through lists of related values, keeping track of an ever changing number of ...

I've talked before about how I am a lazy shell script programmer. It might be because I'm simply not a full-time professional software developer, and I don't even administer my own servers anymore—I ...

A shell script is a way to automate a task by using a command line (i.e. using Terminal to access the underlying UNIX system in Max OS X). A simple "program" can be written that uses command line ...

On Unix — the progenitor of Linux — there was /bin/sh. It was simple, by comparison to today’s shells, but it allowed you to enter commands and — most importantly — execute lists of commands. In fact, ...