Preface
2
Chapter 4, Texting and Driving, has a collection of recipes that explains most of the command-
line text processing tools well under GNU/Linux with a number of task examples. It also has
supplementary recipes for giving a detailed overview of regular expressions and commands
such as sed and awk. This chapter goes through solutions to most of the frequently used text
processing tasks in a variety of recipes. It is an essential read for any serious task.
Chapter 5, Tangled Web? Not At All!, has a collection of shell-scripting recipes that talk to
services on the Internet. This chapter is intended to help readers understand how to interact
with the Web using shell scripts to automate tasks such as collecting and parsing data
from web pages. This is discussed using POST and GET to web pages, writing clients to web
services. The second edition uses new authorization mechanisms such as OAuth for services
such as Twitter.
Chapter 6, The Backup Plan, shows several commands used for performing data back up,
archiving, compression, and so on. In addition to faster compression techniques, this second
edition also talks about creating entire disk images.
Chapter 7, The Old-boy Network, has a collection of recipes that talks about networking on
Linux and several commands useful for writing network-based scripts. The chapter starts
with an introductory basic networking primer and goes on to cover usages of ssh – one of
the most powerful commands on any modern GNU/Linux system. We discuss advanced port
Chapter 8, Put on the Monitor's Cap, walks through several recipes related to monitoring
activities on the Linux system and tasks used for logging and reporting. The chapter explains
tasks such as calculating disk usage, monitoring user access, and CPU usage. In this second
edition, we also learn how to optimize power consumption, monitor disks, and check their
Chapter 9, Administration Calls, has a collection of recipes for system administration.
This chapter explains different commands to collect details about the system and user
management using scripting. We also discuss bulk image resizing and accessing MySQL
databases from the shell. New in this edition is that we learn how to use the GNU Screen to
manage multiple terminals without needing a window manager.
Basic user experience with any GNU/Linux platform will help you easily follow the book. We
have tried to keep all the recipes in the book precise and as simple to follow as possible. Your
curiosity for learning with the Linux platform is the only prerequisite for the book. Step-by-step
explanations are provided for solving the scripting problems explained in the book. In order to
run and test the examples in the book, a Ubuntu/Debian Linux installation is recommended,
be a straightforward reference to essential shell-scripting tasks, as well as a learning aid to