Skip one-click backup apps. This rsync script gives you full control over what gets saved and when, plus logs and a few hard-won lessons.

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 ...

Once a script is prepared and tested, you can get a significant task completed simply by typing the script's name followed by any required arguments. Developing scripts to handle your more complicated ...

If you're not yet comfortable with writing scripts on Unix and Linux systems, this post might get you off to a healthy start. Creating a script on a Unix or Linux system can be dead easy or ...

Although bash scripts are regularly maligned, they do have a certain simplicity and ease of creation that makes them hard to resist. But sometimes you really need to do some heavy lifting in another ...

The printf command offers well-defined behavior following the POSIX standard, which means it works the same way across shells and systems. Where echo often fails with escape sequences, printf handles ...

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 ...

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