Lakshman Sarath - Linux shell scripting cookbook: over 110 practical recipes to solve real-world shell problems, guaranteed to make you wonder how you ever lived without them

Shantanu Tushar is an advanced GNU/Linux user since his college days. He works as an application developer and contributes to the software in the KDE projects.

Shantanu has been fascinated by computers since he was a child, and spent most of his high school time writing C code to perform daily activities. Since he started using GNU/Linux, he has been using shell scripts to make the computer do all the hard work for him. He also takes time to visit students at various colleges to introduce them to the power of Free Software, including its various tools. Shantanu is a well-known contributor in the KDE community and works on Calligra, Gluon and the Plasma subprojects. He looks after maintaining Calligra Active KDE's office document viewer for tablets, Plasma Media Center, and the Gluon Player. One day, he believes, programming will be so easy that everybody will love to write programs for their computers.

Shantanu can be reached by e-mail on <.

I would like to thank my friends and family for the support and encouragement they've given me, especially to my sweet sister for her patience when I couldn't get time to talk to her. I am particularly thankful to Sinny Kumari for patiently testing the scripts to make sure they function properly and Sudhendu Kumar for helping me with the recipe on GNU Screen.

I must also thank Krishna, Madhusudan, and Santosh who introduced me to the wonderful world of GNU/Linux and Free Software. Also, a big thanks to all the reviewers of the book for taking the time to painfully go through every minute detail in the book and help me in improving it. I am also thankful to the whole team at Packt Publishing, without whose efforts and experience, this second edition wouldn't have happened.

Sarath Lakshman is a 23 year old who was bitten by the Linux bug during his teenage years. He is a software engineer working in ZCloud engineering group at Zynga, India. He 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. Currently, he is exploring his passion about scalable distributed systems in his spare time. Sarath can be reached via his website http://www.sarathlakshman.com.