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Mastering Linux Shell Scripting

You're reading from   Mastering Linux Shell Scripting A practical guide to Linux command-line, Bash scripting, and Shell programming

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Product type Paperback
Published in Apr 2018
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781788990554
Length 284 pages
Edition 2nd Edition
Languages
Tools
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Authors (2):
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Mokhtar Ebrahim Mokhtar Ebrahim
Author Profile Icon Mokhtar Ebrahim
Mokhtar Ebrahim
Andrew Mallett Andrew Mallett
Author Profile Icon Andrew Mallett
Andrew Mallett
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Toc

Table of Contents (17) Chapters Close

Preface 1. The What and Why of Scripting with Bash FREE CHAPTER 2. Creating Interactive Scripts 3. Conditions Attached 4. Creating Code Snippets 5. Alternative Syntax 6. Iterating with Loops 7. Creating Building Blocks with Functions 8. Introducing the Stream Editor 9. Automating Apache Virtual Hosts 10. AWK Fundamentals 11. Regular Expressions 12. Summarizing Logs with AWK 13. A Better lastlog with AWK 14. Using Python as a Bash Scripting Alternative 15. Assessments 16. Other Books You May Enjoy

Script comments

We should always introduce commenting scripts early in the piece. A script comment is prefaced with a # symbol. Anything after the # symbol is a comment and is not evaluated by the script. The shebang, #!/bin/bash, is primarily a comment and, as such, is not evaluated by the shell. The shell running the script reads the whole shebang, so it knows which command interpreter to hand the script over to. A comment may be at the start of a line or partway into the line. Shell scripting does not have the notion of multi-line comments.

If you are not already familiar with comments, then please note that they are added to the script to describe who wrote the script, when it was written and last updated, and what the script does. They are the metadata of the script.

The following is an example of comments in scripts:

#!/bin/bash
# Welcome to bash scripting
# Author: Mokhtar...
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