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 ...

Last year, I wrote an article for Linux Journal titled "Building Your March Madness Bracket" My article was timely, arriving just in time for the "March Madness" college basketball series. You see, I ...

You normally think of a critical section — that is, a piece of a program that excludes other programs from using a resource — as a pretty advanced technique. You certainly don’t often think of them as ...

I've never done shell scripting before so be easy. I'm working on converting a bunch of .mkv files I have to .mp4 for playback on my AppleTV. I've installed handbrake onto my server and all the files ...

Imagine that you want to output multiple lines of text in Bash, or any shell script. Maybe it’s for a help string for a particularly convoluted shell script you’re writing. You could have a separate ...

I've got a little FreeBSD box running as a web/mail server. Every so often I'll make some tarball backups of important files and directories. First, there's the important system configuration stuff, ...