Learn Bash Scripting

The export command is a built-in command of the Bash shell that is very handy to know when you work on Linux systems or create Bash scripts. What does the export command do in Linux? The export command is used to make variables or functions in the current shell environment also available to child processes … Read more

Have you ever seen the message “syntax error near unexpected token” while running one of your Bash scripts? In this guide, I will show you why this error occurs and how to fix it. “Error Near Unexpected Token” is a Bash syntax error that reports bad syntax in your script or command. Many things can … Read more

The Bash sleep command delays the execution of the command after it for a given amount of time. The sleep time is expressed in seconds. The use of the sleep command is common when scheduling a task every X seconds or when a script relies on another script to complete its execution. These are three … Read more

In Bash scripts is very common to check if a file or a directory exist. How do you check if a file or a directory exists using Bash? In Linux everything is a file. You can use the test command followed by the operator -f to test if a file exists and if it’s a … Read more

Using the cURL command in a Bash script can be useful, but why? We live in the era of APIs… …you ask for data and you get it back… But how can you know if your API request is successful? HTTP response codes are able to tell you that, for example, a successful request is … Read more

Have you ever tried to get the directory of your Bash script programmatically? It’s a common thing people ask and it can be done in different ways. The first thing to look at to solve this problem is the $0 variable, used in Bash to store the first element of the command executed. Create a … Read more

Why would you exit from a Bash script? Let’s say you are writing a script…there’s one thing that is almost certain… At some point, your script is likely to break because of unexpected conditions you might have not considered. So, what can you do about it? How can you exit a Bash script in case … Read more

I want to loop through the lines of a file with a Bash script and one of the ways to do it is using a for loop. What is a for loop? A for loop is one of the most common programming constructs and it’s used to execute a given block of code given a … Read more

In this article, we will create a simple Bash script and show how to pass arguments to it using the Linux command line. How can you pass arguments to a Bash script? Arguments passed to a Bash script follow the name of the script in the command line and they are separated from each other … Read more