About the Author
Sarath Lakshman is a 21 year old who was bitten by the Linux bug during his teenage years. He is an undergraduate student of Computer Science and Engineering at Model Engineering College, Cochin, Kerala.
Sarath is a life hacker who loves to explore innovations. He is a GNU/Linux enthusiast and hactivist of free and open source software. He spends most of his time hacking with computers and having fun with his great friends. Sarath is well known as the developer of SLYNUX (2005)a user friendly GNU/Linux distribution for Linux newbies. The free and open source software projects he has contributed to are PiTiVi Video editor, SLYNUX GNU/Linux distro, Swathantra Malayalam Computing, School-Admin, Istanbul, and the Pardus Project. He has authored many articles for the Linux For You magazine on various domains of FOSS technologies. He had made a contribution to several different open source projects during his multiple Google Summer of Code projects. He currently lives with his parents in Kerala. Sarath can be reached via his website http://www.sarathlakshman.com.
I would like to thank my friends and family for the great support and encouragement they have given me for all my endeavors. I would like to thank my friends Anu Mahadevan and Neenu Jacob for the tireless enthusiasm and patience to read through the chapter developments and providing comments during development. I would also like to thank Mr. Atanu Datta for helping me come up with the chapter titles. I extend my gratitude to the team at Packt Publishing who helped me in making this book happen.
About the Reviewers
Aric Pedersen is the author of cPanel User Guide and Tutorial (ISBN 978-1-904811-92-3) and Web Host Manager Administration Guide (ISBN 978-1-904811-50-3), both written for Packt Publishing. He also served as a reviewer for CUPS Administrative Guide (ISBN 978-1-84719-258-5) and Linux E-mail Second Edition (ISBN 978-1-847198-64-8) published by Packt Publishing.
Aric has over nine years of experience working as a System Administrator. He currently works for Hostdime.com, the world-class web host; and also for Netenberg.com, makers of Fantastico, the world's most popular web script installer for cPanel servers.
I would like to thank PMUG (http://www.pmug-nj.org/) for years of interesting content and camaraderie.
John L Weatherwax has been in love with computers ever since he had access to one. An applied mathematician by trade, he began his study of computer programming with the Pascal programming language on the computer that his father bought way before most people had even thought of using a computer for anything truly practical. As an undergraduate, he obtained dual degrees in physics and mathematics from the University of Missouri Columbia and as a graduate student he obtained a Ph.D. from M.I.T. in Applied Mathematics. After graduating, he worked for many years applying pattern recognition techniques to various problems in electrical engineering before transitioning to mathematical finance. In school, he was strongly influenced by the UNIX/Linux philosophy of using simpler component programs together to solve larger problems. Many years later, while exploring various trading strategies as a quantitative analysis at a Wall Street firm, he still uses UNIX commands and the UNIX philosophy on a daily basis. Most of the work he does now is related to using mathematical models to predict prices and trade various financial instruments. He spends his free time working on applied mathematics and pattern recognition (much of which can be found on his website at http://waxworksmath.com/) and spending time with his family.
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This book is dedicated to my parents who showed me the bright choices in life.
Preface
GNU/Linux is a remarkable operating system that comes with a complete development environment that is stable, reliable, and extremely powerful. The shell, being the native interface to communicate with the operating system, is capable of controlling the entire operating system. An understanding of shell scripting helps you to have better awareness of the operating system and helps you to automate most of the manual tasks with a few lines of script, saving you an enormous amount of time. Shell scripts can work with many external command-line utilities for tasks such as querying information, easy text manipulation, scheduling task running times, preparing reports, sending mails, and so on. There are numerous commands on the GNU/Linux shell, which are documented but hard to understand. This book is a collection of essential command-line script recipes along with detailed descriptions tuned with practical applications. It covers most of the important commands in Linux with a variety of use cases, accompanied by plenty of examples. This book helps you to perform complex data manipulations involving tasks such as text processing, file management, backups, and more with the combination of few commands.