Beginner's Guide To Bash Scripting

Welcome to newbtopro.com's Beginner Guide To Bash Scripting. This guide's main purpose is to familiarize users to using bash in Linux.

What is Bash?

Bash is the de-facto Linux shell. A shell is a command interpreter. If you can remember back to the days of MSDOS, you would remember the popular "C:\" prompt. Bash provides an environment similar to MSDOS, although bash is far more robust, flexible and powerful than DOS is (or was).

There are two main ways to use bash: typing in commands and running them from the command prompt and creating a script to help "automate" mundane tasks.

This guide will talk about both of these methods.

Why Learn Bash?

If you are a system administrator or you are an aspiring Linux power user, learning bash is fundemental to your goals. While casual users are fine with manuvering through a friendly point and click environment like GNOME or KDE, you want to be able run commands via a command line interface (CLI) and you want to be able to create simple bash scripts that can be executed to complete more complicated tasks.

Getting Bash

While most Linux-based systems come with bash as the default shell, you may need to download it from the GNU website:

http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/bash.html

So let's get started!

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