Why shell scripting
Shell scripts are useful for automating processes that you repeat at the prompt.
Why shell scripting?
- Shell scripts can take input from a user or file and output them to the screen.
- Whenever you find yourself doing the same task over and over again you should use shell scripting, i.e., repetitive task automation.
- Creating your own power tools/utilities.
- Automating command input or entry.
- Customizing administrative tasks.
- Creating simple applications.
- Since scripts are well tested, the chances of errors are reduced while configuring services or system administration tasks such as adding new users.
Practical examples where shell scripting actively used
- Monitoring your Linux system.
- Data backup and creating snapshots.
- Dumping Oracle or MySQL database for backup.
- Creating email based alert system.
- Find out what processes are eating up your system resources.
- Find out available and free memory.
- Find out all logged in users and what they are doing.
- Find out if all necessary network services are running or not. For example if web server failed then send an alert to system administrator via a pager or an email.
- Find out all failed login attempt, if login attempt are continue repeatedly from same network IP automatically block all those IPs accessing your network/service via firewall.
- User administration as per your own security policies.
- Find out information about local or remote servers.
- Configure server such as BIND (DNS server) to add zone entries.
Shell scripting is fun. It is useful to create nice (perhaps ugly) things in shell scripting. Here are a few examples of scripts I use everyday:
- Find out today's weather (useful when you are busy in a chat room).
- Find out what that site is running (just like netcraft).
- Download RSS feeds and display them as you login or in your email.
- Find out the name of the MP3 file you are listening to.
- Monitor your domain expiry date every day.
- Easy to use.
- Quick start, and interactive debugging.
- Time Saving.
- Sys Admin task automation.
- Shell scripts can execute without any additional effort on nearly any modern UNIX / Linux / BSD / Mac OS X operating system as they are written an interpreted language.
- Compatibility problems between different platforms.
- Slow execution speed.
- A new process launched for almost every shell command executed.
Which Shell are we going to use in this tutorial?
- Bash shell.
After completing this tutorial, you will be able to:
- Understand the basis of Linux shell scripting.
- Write shell scripts and use it to save time with automated scripts.
- Customize shell start-up files.
- Create nifty utilities.
- Control your administration tasks such as Linux user management, Linux system monitoring etc.