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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

For this article, I thought it would be beneficial to go back to some basics of shell scripting and look at how functions work. Most script writers probably eschew using functions because it's a bit ...