The last of the basic building blocks of shell scripting are conditional statements, allowing you to decide programmatically whether to execute a block of statements based on a logical test, and flow ...

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 ...

Us geeks mostly think of the command line as the best place for text manipulation. It's a natural with cat, grep and shell scripts. But although you can't necessarily view your results from within a ...

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 ...

I recently switched to Mac OS X as my primary desktop operating system after spending over a decade on Linux. Although Apple's operating system supplies practically all of the command line tools I ...