For system administrators shell scripting can be a very useful way to drastically improve workflow. Join Swayam Prakasha to find out how you can employ some fundemental tips and techniques to make your life easier…

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years: programming shell scripts suck. They are ugly and error prone. The only reason why we still do it? There is no real replacement. Or at least that was the case, until today.

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.

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.
* Very minimal graphical interface. You only see what you need
* what is not browsing, is not in uzbl. Things like url changing, loading/saving of bookmarks, saving history, downloads... are handled through external scripts that you write

Bash is the default command line interface for many Linux distributions and a powerful scripting language. Here are some suggestions that will keep your Bash scripts efficient and lean. Feel free to comment with your own suggestions.

The extensible and open nature of Ubiquity means that you can easily expand its functionality by installing additional scripts that add new commands. There are dozens of Ubiquity scripts floating on the Web, but here are a few that you might find particularly useful.

When you're programming a shell script, you often only need the current directory name, not the whole path that the pwd command returns. Here are four ways you can extract only the current directory.