Ever wondered why programming in Bash is so difficult? Bash employs the same constructs as traditional programming languages; however, under the hood, the logic is rather different. The Bourne-Again ...

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 ...

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 ...

Linux Journal, representing 25+ years of publication, is the original magazine of the global Open Source community.

This article is reprinted from the book A Practical Guide to Linux Commands, Editors, and Shell Programming 3rd edition, with permission of the author and publisher ...