Shell scripting covers almost every essential need to create automated command-line programs. But what about going beyond the standards and extending our arsenal with some external tools? Let's dive a bit inside awk and sed.
Sometimes we want to store more than a single value in a variable. And sometimes decisions have to be made for a hundred times. Let's jump into creating arrays, flow control with loops and how to organize our commands with functions, so we can store them into scripts.
Once we've learnt how to freely manipulate directories, files and data, it's time to give more power to the command line storing our values in variables and making decisions based on their data.
When working with text data, something that stands out in scripting is using regular expressions (aka regex). Regular expressions are symbolic notations we can use to identify patterns in text data.
Although the best way to get knowledge in a subject is by doing things with it, before we start with full shell scripting we need to get in touch with the command line.
Scripting automates processes that are tedious to repeat. Well known scripting languages like Python or Lua are good to know and perfect to use, however in *nix systems there is shell scripting too.