Question

I’m learning UNIX/LINUX shell scripting and trying to think about it appropriate usage?

The only thing that comes into mind – it’ll be nice for let’s say backup operations and logs management….But I’m sure it goes way beyond that…or is it?
I’m sure there are people on this server who use Shell scripting on the daily basis.
Can you tell me what do you use it for in your organization/business?

Thanks:)

Answer 1

You can do quite everything in shell, but it is easy to write ugly and slow scripts.

First domain of expertise of shells is to start and combine other programs. This is exceptionally well suited for:

• file manipulations: list, move, copy, compress, archive
• text lines manipulation: filter (grep), modify (sed), delete lines (sed), combine files (paste), sort (sort), unify (sort -u)

All those operation are NOT shell operation, but the shell is the glue that put them all together.

• file operations are generally combined with flow control instructions (while, if, for)
• line operations are combined with pipes | and named pipe mkfifo