Safaribooks online were availabe in HTML-View for a long time and were accessible with free software.Now the O'Reilly Safari team has decided to stop this and deliver online books in Adobe flash format only for online reading. As expected gnash does not work. This means reading and browsing O'Reilly books online is no more possible with free software.

Scripts are files that contain shell commands which may be short or can be very complex. Scripts just make it easier because you can invoke one command to run all of the commands in the script. Here instead of using 8 separate commands you can use one command to execute all of them.

Free and open source software is all about sharing so, prompted by a reader who emailed me last week to ask about books on Linux, I spent some time over the weekend doing research. The result is a short list of books that users - from newbies to gurus - can download and read at their leisure.

Bash Shell scripting...every Linux admin needs it to save time. One aspect of shell scripting is writing functions. Creating functions in your scripts allows you to create containers of code that you can reuse in one script or multiple scripts. This tutorial, with examples, shows you how to create functions. The article is a part of a free shell scripting course.

How to use a Bash Shell script to record the activity of users. This
script is useful in rebuilding the actions of users as they work at
the command line.

Reading files is no big deal with bash: you just redirect the input to the script or pipe the output of another command into the script, or you could do it inside the script if the file names are pre-determined. You could also use process substitution to pass in the open files (command pipelines actually) from the command line.

Once upon a time there was a pasty-faced geek who lived in his mother's basement and spent his time hacking and collecting online porn. He considered himself an open source expert and took pleasure in displaying his vastly superior knowledge on online forums with such eloquent statements as "RTFM NOOB!"

If the fact that the ParanoidLinux distribution (now in an "alpha-alpha stage") is based on a work of science fiction isn't unsettling, consider two key peripheral issues.

Although the actual documentation you get with many open source applications and platforms can feel paltry compared to what you get with proprietary alternatives, many book authors have served up free, online books on open source topics. We round these up on a regular basis here at OStatic, and in this post you'll find seven online books that you can get comfortable with quickly.