I'm still new to bash scripting, and I'm trying to get a script to work. The other scripts to which this refers, start.sh and stop.sh, work fine, as well as my references to them. The only problem is ...

Bash scripts are powerful, but with power comes great responsibility. It’s very easy for sloppy or poorly-planned code to do real damage, so it’s a good idea to be careful and practice defensive ...

There are quite a few ways to increment and decrement numeric variables in bash. This post examines the many ways you can do this. When preparing scripts that will run in bash, it’s often critical to ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...