If you're not yet comfortable with writing scripts on Unix and Linux systems, this post might get you off to a healthy start. Creating a script on a Unix or Linux system can be dead easy or ...

This Wiley Publishing tome is big (more than 650 pages), useful and very complete. Be warned, however, that its scope is limited to system administration. The purpose of the book is to solve “real ...

Shell scripting is one of those skills that are absolutely invaluable on especially UNIX and BSD-based systems like the BSDs, the two zillion Linux distributions as well as MacOS. Yet not every shell ...

Ever wondered why programming in Bash is so difficult? Bash employs the same constructs as traditional programming languages; however, under the hood, the logic is rather different. The Bourne-Again ...

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 ...

Attaching a remote drive or directory on a Windows box is called “drive mapping” though the process is essentially the same as what we call mounting in the Unix world. While I rarely spend any ...

An associative array is an array which uses strings as indices instead of integers. To see how associative arrays work, we’re going to look at both the Korn shell and Perl, though only the newest ...

We aren’t doing the next generation of Linux and Unix admins any favors by forgetting init scripts and fundamental tools I happened across a post on Reddit by chance, asking about textfile ...

I recently switched to Mac OS X as my primary desktop operating system after spending over a decade on Linux. Although Apple’s operating system supplies practically all of the command line tools I ...