To get the most out of this book

You should have access to a computer with Bash 4.0 or higher installed or available, and be able to type commands into it via a TTY, terminal emulator, Telnet, or SSH connection (for example, using PuTTY). This book does give some guidance in the first chapter on how to install Bash on your system if it's not already there, or if the installed version is too old (as may be the case on macOS X). You will need either administrative-level (root) access to the computer to install Bash yourself, or a cooperative systems administrator to help you.

If you are not sure which operating system to use, we recommend the Ubuntu distribution of GNU/Linux, available from https://www.ubuntu.com/. The LTS (Long Term Support) version will do fine. Ubuntu is open source, free to download, thoroughly documented, and relatively easy to install. You can run this operating system in a virtual machine using a program or hypervisor such as VMware or VirtualBox—it does not have to be installed directly on your computer's hardware.

At the time of writing, Windows 10 has a new Bash subsystem available and in active development, the Windows Subsystem for Linux. You may find that most of the material in this book is relevant and usable on such a system, but the book does not specifically support this, and we highly recommend installing a full GNU/Linux or BSD system for your learning and experiments instead.

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from your account at www.packt.com. If you purchased this book elsewhere, you can visit www.packt.com/support and register to have the files emailed directly to you.

You can download the code files by following these steps:

1. Log in or register at www.packt.com.
2. Select the SUPPORT tab.
3. Click on Code Downloads & Errata.
4. Enter the name of the book in the Search box and follow the onscreen instructions.

Once the file is downloaded, please make sure that you unzip or extract the folder using the latest version of:

• WinRAR/7-Zip for Windows
• Zipeg/iZip/UnRarX for Mac
• 7-Zip/PeaZip for Linux

The code bundle for the book is also hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Bash-Quick-Start-Guide. In case there's an update to the code, it will be updated on the existing GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots/diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: http://www.packtpub.com/sites/default/files/downloads/9781789538830_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

CodeInText: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "Mount the downloaded WebStorm-10*.dmg disk image file as another disk in your system."

A block of code is set as follows:

#!/bin/bash
printf 'Starting script\n' >> log
printf 'Creating test directory\n' >> log
mkdir test || exit
printf 'Changing into test directory\n' >> log
cd test || exit
printf 'Writing current date\n' >> log
date > date || exit

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ printf 'Hello, world\n' > myfile $ ls -l myfile -rw-r--r-- 1 bashuser bashuser 1 2018-07-29 20:53:23 myfile

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For example, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in the text like this. Here is an example: "Select System info from the Administration panel."

Warnings or important notes appear like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.