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 ...

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 ...

Harness the power of bash and learn how to scrape websites for exciting new images every morning. So, you want a cool dynamic desktop wallpaper without dodgy programs and a million viruses? The good ...

You need to package up a bunch of files, send them somewhere, and do something with them at the destination. It isn’t an uncommon scenario. The obvious answer is to create an archive — a zip or tar ...

FFmpeg was designed as a cross-platform solution for video and audio recording, conversion, and streaming. Its About page describes the command-line tool as “the leading multimedia framework, able to ...

To change a password in Linux through a Bash script, he two scripts that are most important are 'Create Users' and 'Change Passwords Shell' scripts, for the system admin which regularly uses the mail ...

A recent post about debugging constructs surprised me. There were quite a few comments about how you didn’t need a debugger, as long as you had printf. For that matter, we’ve all debugged systems ...

If you've used the command line much at all you know about I/O redirection for redirecting input to and/or output from a program. What you don't see all that often or that you may not be familiar with ...

When a question like “How can a bash script tell you where it’s located?” pops into your head, it seems like it ought to be a very easy question to answer. We’ve got commands like pwd, but … pwd tells ...