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 ...

Here are some basic skills to get started with bash, one of the best shells for preparing and using scripts on Linux. Scripting in Linux–putting commands into a file so you can run them as a group—is ...

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 ...

We often write quick bash scripts and judging by the comments, half of us use bash or a similar shell to pop out quick, useful scripts, and half of us think that’s an abomination, and you should only ...

The first software that I was actually paid to develop was a 2-page shell script that prompted the user for a dozen or so pieces of information, before launching a set of cooperating processes. Those ...

Many bash scripts start out as something quick and dirty but then become so useful that they live for years, indeed sometimes seeing more use than our traditional programs. Now that you can even run ...

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 ...