Check if a file is really a file, whether a string contains anything, and whether you can run a program with these vital patterns.

Linux Journal, representing 25+ years of publication, is the original magazine of the global Open Source community.

For Linux users, the command line is a celebrated part of our entire experience. Unlike other popular operating systems, where the command line is a scary proposition for all but the most experienced ...

It is no secret that we often use and abuse bash to write things that ought to be in a different language. But bash does have its attractions. In the modern world, it is practically everywhere. It can ...

I'm passing a file to my script and then I need to get into a for loop until all the lines are read and manipulated, but what was the simple syntax for reading each line of the inputed file? (assuming ...

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 ...

Administrators are typically burdened with tons of tasks, many of which are repetitive. One of the best ways to automate such tasks is to use scripting. Here's a look at how scripting can help ...

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 ...