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.

Previously I've shown how to use the bash while loop in a bash script. Today I'm going to show how to use another type of do loop in bash: the for loop.

Sometimes you get a bunch of files that are named in an annoying way and you’d like to change the naming convention for all of them. Maybe you forgot to change the settings on your CD ripping software and it ended up creating a bunch of long file names that you don’t like.
The aptly named "rename" terminal command comes to the rescue and allows you to bulk rename files from the command line.

The Bash shell is the default shell environment in most Linux distributions, including all flavours of Debian. One default feature of the Bash shell is to record a history of all the commands entered by a user in a log file called .bash_history, found in the user's home directory.

By and large, most Red Hat Linux systems will have Bash as the default shell. Bash is a darn great shell, but this article is about another equally great shell, called Z-Shell, that has most of the attributes of Bash, but in some cases goes the extra mile to give you the flexibility to customize your shell more than Bash allows.

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.

We often read (including in the book Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide by Mendel Cooper) that if we pass variable names as parameters to functions, they will be treated as string literals and cannot be dereferenced (ie the value is not available). But this is not so...

One of the most common structures in programming is the Do Loop. The version that I’m going to show today is the While Do Loop. This post shows how to use the basic structure of the While Do loop in a Bash script.

Mass Rename is a simple pair of shell scripts which make it easier to move, rename, or copy multiple files at once. It is intended mainly as an automatic and simple way to rename multiple files with a customizable prefix and a progressive number. It is also possible to modify the rename format simply by editing one of the scripts.