Bash and I – The Bourne-Again SHell

 Articles, Opinion  8 Responses »
Dec 112011
 

by
Frank Harris-Smith

Bash has been around since pre-historic times, at least before GNU/Linux’s first release in 1991.

My first personal encounter with Bash was in 1993. This was two years before Microsoft Windows 95 was released and Windows 3.1 was just a bad joke. The Software Development Company I was working for was using SCO Unix running on i486 systems to power Kiosks for displaying, printing and selling sheet music.

My second encounter with Bash was over a decade later was when I first started experimenting with GNU/Linux. I had found a CD in the back of a Linux book with RedHat 7.2 on it– which used an older kernel that had a few missing functions. Like accessing a digital camera, a simple USB Memory Device. So I wrote Bash scripts to mount and access the camera. Then a few more scripts to access a Palm-Pilot like device (My Sony Clie’) and standard USB FlashDrives
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Pipes – what are they and Example of Use

 Articles, Guides  6 Responses »
Sep 252011
 

Unix based operating systems like Linux offer a unique approach to join two commands on the terminal, with it you can take the output of the first command and use it as input of the second command, this is the concept of pipe or | . Pipes allow two separate process to communicate with each other also if they were not created to do it, so this open an infinite series of opportunity.

A basic example is:

ls -l | grep rwxrwxrwx

This command will print the list of all the files in the local directory that have permission rwxrwxrwx (or that have rwxrwxrwx in their name).

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