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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

I've recently written about using bash arrays and bash regular expressions, so here's a more useful example of using them to test IP addresses for validity. To belabor the obvious: IP addresses are 32 ...

Linux 101: What are environment variables? Your email has been sent Jack Wallen introduces you to Linux environment variables. What are they and how are they set and ...