One of the common tasks you'll encounter when scripting in Bash is performing arithmetic operations on variables, particularly division. This process might seem straightforward, but it requires ...

Learning this one feature means covering a huge chunk of Bash's capabilities.

Bash, aka the Bourne-Again Shell, has a newly discovered security hole. And, for many Unix or Linux Web servers, it's a major problem. The flaw involves how Bash evaluates environment variables. With ...

Bash vs. Fish? I've tried both Linux shells, and one makes using the command line much easier ...

If you're working in a Linux environment, chances are you've encountered environment variables—even if you didn’t realize it at the time. They quietly power much of what goes on behind the scenes in ...

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 ...

Variables often look like $var, but they also look like $1, $*, $? and $$. Let's take a look at what all these $ values can tell you. A lot of important values are ...

This post follows up on Part 1 by examining the many ways that you can test the value of variables – e.g., whether they equal particular strings like “yes” or “no”, if they have a numeric value, if ...