Skip one-click backup apps. This rsync script gives you full control over what gets saved and when, plus logs and a few hard-won lessons.

and only files matching my_test_here would make it onto do_something. I love the while-read pattern, but it just doesn't feel right that there's no simpler, built-in, idiomatic way to write a function ...

Using a function in bash allows you to create something in Linux that works as if it were a script within a script. Whenever the data being processed matches a set of conditions, your script can call ...

The first software that I was actually paid to develop was a 2-page shell script that prompted the user for a dozen or so pieces of information, before launching a set of cooperating processes. Those ...

While Linux systems install with thousands of commands, bash also supplies a large number of “built-ins”—commands that are not sitting in the file system as separate files, but are part of bash itself ...

You need to package up a bunch of files, send them somewhere, and do something with them at the destination. It isn’t an uncommon scenario. The obvious answer is to create an archive — a zip or tar ...

I've recently written about using bash arrays and bash regular expressions, so here's a more useful example of using them to test IP addresses for validity. To belabor the obvious: IP addresses are 32 ...

FFmpeg was designed as a cross-platform solution for video and audio recording, conversion, and streaming. Its About page describes the command-line tool as “the leading multimedia framework, able to ...

Whether you do a lot of work in the Terminal or you just don't feel like opening iTunes and searching through your library, reader CamJN's fplay script will get you listening to music in seconds. The ...

Many bash scripts start out as something quick and dirty but then become so useful that they live for years, indeed sometimes seeing more use than our traditional programs. Now that you can even run ...