Creating our first shell program and automating a process

The Bourne Again shell, or bash, is a common terminal for Linux users to control their computers. One of the great things about it is it can be written into longer scripts, which do multiple things, or make decisions based on certain information, which makes what would be a long, manual task virtually effortless. Let's go over a practical example of writing a shell script to make our life easier.

Getting ready

The terminal window you've been working in is your shell. In fact, every command you type is more or less a one-line script! We'll only need a connection and our favorite text editor.

If you are still in the ch3 directory, you are ready to go. If not, you can get there with this:

cd /home/pi/share/ch3/

How to do it...

Here is another recipe we can use later, and it fulfils a practical purpose. We're going to take a reading on the Raspberry Pi Zero's built-in temperature sensor and output the value with the time. We'll save this...