If you're writing a Bash script, you will invariably need to pass values to it—aka arguments or positional parameters. Bash's ...

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 ...

Bash functions are essentially reusable wrappers around commands. You can use them to define complex command pipelines or to perform some detailed work and echo the result. They accept arguments and ...

Once a script is prepared and tested, you can get a significant task completed simply by typing the script's name followed by any required arguments. Developing scripts to handle your more complicated ...

One of the delights in Bash, zsh, or whichever shell tickles your fancy in your OSS distribution of choice, is the ease of which you can use scripts. These can be shell scripts, or use the Perl, ...

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

Jack Wallen shows how you can create a Linux shell script that requires a password without having to save a password within the script. Image: dennizn/Adobe Stock ...

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 ...

Finally, I'm going to finish the mail merge script, just in time for Replicant Day. Oh, sorry, back to topic here. I was developing a shell script that would let you specify a text document with ...