This post follows up on Part 1 by examining the many ways that you can test the value of variables – e.g., whether they equal particular strings like “yes” or “no”, if they have a numeric value, if ...

Here are steps you can take to ensure that your bash scripts work as intended and are easy to update. Committing routine and even rarely required tasks to scripts is almost always a big win because ...

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 ...

A software vendor has given us a script that sets some environmental variables. It needs to be run manually by cd-ing into the directory and executing '. ./.script.sh'. This seems a bit weird to me - ...

A recent post about debugging constructs surprised me. There were quite a few comments about how you didn’t need a debugger, as long as you had printf. For that matter, we’ve all debugged systems ...

I have a simple API running in Flask on a Raspberry Pi. The Pi has Debian (buster) installed. In the API, I am making calls to Twilio. I'm storing sensitive info like the auth token in environment ...

If you are a traditional programmer, using bash for scripting may seem limiting sometimes, but for certain tasks, bash can be very productive. It turns out, some of the limits of bash are really ...

Finally, I'm going to finish the mail merge script, just in time for Replicant Day. Oh, sorry, back to topic here. I was developing a shell script that would let you specify a text document with ...

Bash, aka the Bourne-Again Shell, has a newly discovered security hole. And, for many Unix or Linux Web servers, it's a major problem. The flaw involves how Bash evaluates environment variables. With ...

If you're a cybersecurity enthusiast or ethical hacker who wants to learn more about building hacking tools, this book is for ...