Writing Simple Script Utilities
Richard A. Blum, Christine Bresnahan · 2015
The typical Linux system administrator has many various jobs to do daily, from monitoring disk space to backing up important files to managing user accounts. Shell script utilities can make these tasks much easier. This chapter demonstrates some of the capabilities you have writing script utilities in the bash shell. It also demonstrates two methods for using shell scripts to archive data on the Linux system. The chapter shows how to create an automated shell script that can take snapshots of specified directories and keep an archive of your data's past versions. Managing user accounts is much more than just adding, modifying, and deleting accounts. The chapter explains how to use the du command to determine disk space consumption. The sed and gawk commands are used to retrieve specific information from the data.