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 ...

In this post I'll show you how to create a self extracting bash script to automate the installation of files on your system. This script requires coreutils (for cat, tail), awk, gzip, tar and bash.

Learning this one feature means covering a huge chunk of Bash's capabilities.

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 ...