Do amazing things with the shell
About This Book
- Become an expert in creating powerful shell scripts and explore the full possibilities of the shell
- Automate any administrative task you could imagine, with shell scripts
- Packed with easy-to-follow recipes on new features on Linux, particularly, Debian-based, to help you accomplish even the most complex tasks with ease
Who This Book Is For
If you are a beginner or an intermediate Linux user who wants to master the skill of quickly writing scripts and automate tasks without reading the entire man pages, then this book is for you. You can start writing scripts and one-liners by simply looking at the relevant recipe and its descriptions without any working knowledge of shell scripting or Linux. Intermediate / advanced users, system administrators / developers, and programmers can use this book as a reference when they face problems while coding.
What You Will Learn
- Interact with websites via scripts
- Write shell scripts to mine and process data from the Web
- Automate system backups and other repetitive tasks with crontab
- Create, compress, and encrypt archives of your critical data.
- Configure and monitor Ethernet and wireless networks
- Monitor and log network and system activity
- Tune your system for optimal performance
- Improve your system's security
- Identify resource hogs and network bottlenecks
- Extract audio from video files
- Create web photo albums
- Use git or fossil to manage revision control and interact with FOSS projects
- Create and maintain Linux containers and Virtual Machines
- Run a private Cloud server
In Detail
The shell is the most powerful tool your computer provides. Despite having it at their fingertips, many users are unaware of how much the shell can accomplish.
Using the shell, you can generate databases and web pages from sets of files, automate monotonous admin tasks such as system backups, monitor your system's health and activity, identify network bottlenecks and system resource hogs, and more.
This book will show you how to do all this and much more.
This book, now in its third edition, describes the exciting new features in the newest Linux distributions to help you accomplish more than you imagine. It shows how to use simple commands to automate complex tasks, automate web interactions, download videos, set up containers and cloud servers, and even get free SSL certificates.
Starting with the basics of the shell, you will learn simple commands and how to apply them to real-world issues. From there, you'll learn text processing, web interactions, network and system monitoring, and system tuning.
Software engineers will learn how to examine system applications, how to use modern software management tools such as git and fossil for their own work, and how to submit patches to open-source projects.
Finally, you'll learn how to set up Linux Containers and Virtual machines and even run your own Cloud server with a free SSL Certificate from letsencrypt.org.
Style and approach
This book will take you through useful real-world recipes designed to make your daily life easier when working with the shell.
Clif Flynt has been programming computers since 1970, administering Linux/Unix systems since 1985, and writing since he was 9 years old.
He's active in the Tcl/Tk and Linux user communities. He speaks frequently at technical conferences and user groups.
He owns and runs Noumena Corporation, where he develops custom software and delivers training sessions. His applications have been used by organizations ranging from one man startups to the US Navy. These applications range from distributed simulation systems to tools to help fiction authors write better (Editomat). He has trained programmers on four continents.
When not working with computers, Clif plays guitar, writes fiction experiments with new technologies, and plays with his wife's cats.
He's the author of Tcl/Tk: A Developer's Guide by Morgan Kauffman, 2012, as well as several papers, and magazine articles. His poetry and fiction have been published in small journals, including Write to Meow by Grey Wolfe Press, 2015.
Sarath Lakshman is a 27 year old who was bitten by the Linux bug during his teenage years. He is a software engineer working in ZCloud engineering group at Zynga, India. He is a life hacker who loves to explore innovations. He is a GNU/Linux enthusiast and hactivist of free and open source software. He spends most of his time hacking with computers and having fun with his great friends. Sarath is well known as the developer of SLYNUX (2005) - a user friendly GNU/Linux distribution for Linux newbies. The free and open source software projects he has contributed to are PiTiVi Video editor, SLYNUX GNU/Linux distro, Swathantra Malayalam Computing, School-Admin, Istanbul, and the Pardus Project. He has authored many articles for the Linux For You magazine on various domains of FOSS technologies. He had made a contribution to several different open source projects during his multiple Google Summer of Code projects. Currently, he is exploring his passion about scalable distributed systems in his spare time. Sarath can be reached via his website.
Shantanu Tushar is an advanced GNU/Linux user since his college days. He works as an application developer and contributes to the software in the KDE projects. Shantanu has been fascinated by computers since he was a child, and spent most of his high school time writing C code to perform daily activities. Since he started using GNU/Linux, he has been using shell scripts to make the computer do all the hard work for him. He also takes time to visit students at various colleges to introduce them to the power of Free Software, including its various tools. Shantanu is a well-known contributor in the KDE community and works on Calligra, Gluon and the Plasma subprojects. He looks after maintaining Calligra Active - KDE's offie document viewer for tablets, Plasma Media Center, and the Gluon Player. One day, he believes, programming will be so easy that everybody will love to write programs for their computers. Shantanu can be reached by e-mail on shantanu@kde.org, shantanutushar on Identi.ca/Twitter, or his website.
