Yesterday we took a look at BashDiff, a patch for the bash shell that adds new capabilities. We've already looked at some of the additions that BashDiff makes to bash's commands and string parsing abilities. Today we'll look at modifying positional parameters, parsing XML, talking to ISAM and relational databases, creating GTK+2 GUIs, and a few other tricks and issues.

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.

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.

A shell is a program that acts as an intermediary between the user and the Linux kernel. The shell receives commands from the user through typed words and passes them into the kernel for processing. The kernel has the ability to communicate with hardware and gather resources like files and memory. The most common shell is bash.

BashDiff is a patch for the bash shell that can do an amazing number of things.

Want to be faster at the Linux command line interface? Since most Linux distributions provide Bash as the default CLI, here are some Bash tricks that will help cut down the amount of typing needed to execute commands. Feel free to comment and share your own speed tricks.

Shell is a program, which interprets user commands. The commands are either directly entered by the user or read from a file called the shell script.

The Bash Shell provides the ability to create symbolic names which the shell stores in memory and which can be assigned values so that it can be used repeatedly in a shell script.