What to Take Away
This book focuses on common challenges you might face when writing portable automation, such as when building software or providing orchestration, by making common tasks easily automatable. But the way to get the most out of this book is to take the solution you create for each problem and extrapolate it to other, similar problems you may encounter. For instance, in Chapter 1, we write a portable echo implementation by creating a small wrapper script. While many system admins will get some benefit from this specific script, the important takeaway is the general solution of creating a wrapper script to ensure consistent behavior across platforms. Later on in the book, we delve into some wicked cool features of bash scripting and common utilities available for Unix systems, putting great versatility and power right at your fingertips.
This Book Is for You If . . .
Bash remains a staple tool for anyone working on Unix-like servers or workstations, including web developers (many of whom develop on OS X and deploy to Linux servers), data analysts, mobile app developers, and software engineers—to name just a few! On top of that, more hobbyists are running Linux on their open source microcomputers, like the Raspberry Pi, to automate their smart homes. For all of these uses, shell scripts are perfect.
The applications of these scripts are endlessly useful for both those looking to develop their already substantial bash skills with some cool shell scripts and those who may only use a terminal or shell script every once in a while. Individuals in the latter camp may want to brush up on a few shortcuts or supplement their reading with an introduction to more advanced bash concepts.
This book isn’t a tutorial, though! We aim to bring you practical technical applications of bash scripting and common utilities in (mostly) short, compact scripts, but we don’t provide line-by-line explanations. We explain the core parts of each script, and more seasoned shell scripters might be able to tell how the rest of the script works by reading the code. But we expect you as the reader to play with the script—breaking it and fixing it and altering it to meet your needs—to figure it out. The spirit of these scripts is all about solving common challenges, such as web management or syncing files—problems every techie needs to solve regardless of the tools they’re using.