This Wiley Publishing tome is big (more than 650 pages), useful and very complete. Be warned, however, that its scope is limited to system administration. The purpose of the book is to solve “real ...

If you're not yet comfortable with writing scripts on Unix and Linux systems, this post might get you off to a healthy start. Creating a script on a Unix or Linux system can be dead easy or ...

Scripting allows shell users to automate repetitive tasks, improving reproducibility, reducing the risk of errors, freeing time, and avoiding boredom. Bioinformatics analysis pipelines may involve ...

Attaching a remote drive or directory on a Windows box is called “drive mapping” though the process is essentially the same as what we call mounting in the Unix world. While I rarely spend any ...

When you type commands in the terminal, that’s **standard input**. When you run the command, the results typically go to **standard output**. This input/output model allows you to chain commands ...

While Linux systems install with thousands of commands, bash also supplies a large number of “built-ins”—commands that are not sitting in the file system as separate files, but are part of bash itself ...

A shell script is a way to automate a task by using a command line (i.e. using Terminal to access the underlying UNIX system in Max OS X). A simple "program" can be written that uses command line ...

One of the most convenient ways to manipulate information in scripts is to store it in an array. Arrays facilitate looping through lists of related values, keeping track of an ever changing number of ...