Few aspects of Unix system administration are more intimate than the relationship between the admin and their chosen shell. After all, the shell is the most fundamental interface to the system, the ...

Linux, known for its robustness and flexibility, has been a favorite among developers, system administrators, and technology enthusiasts. One of the pillars of Linux's capabilities is its inherent ...

You need to package up a bunch of files, send them somewhere, and do something with them at the destination. It isn’t an uncommon scenario. The obvious answer is to create an archive — a zip or tar ...

Discover the techniques that help popular scripts succeed.

It is easy to dismiss bash — the typical Linux shell program — as just a command prompt that allows scripting. Bash, however, is a full-blown programming language. I wouldn’t presume to tell you that ...

Last year, I wrote an article for Linux Journal titled "Building Your March Madness Bracket" My article was timely, arriving just in time for the "March Madness" college basketball series. You see, I ...

I've got a little FreeBSD box running as a web/mail server. Every so often I'll make some tarball backups of important files and directories. First, there's the important system configuration stuff, ...

It hurts to see your programs taken apart and their weaknesses exposed, but it will make you a better programmer.