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 ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

One of the common tasks you'll encounter when scripting in Bash is performing arithmetic operations on variables, particularly division. This process might seem straightforward, but it requires ...

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 ...

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 ...