Although Picasa is now available on GNU/Linux, it is still proprietary and, as such, unethical. One year ago, I wrote a simple Bash script that handles a very rapid download of entire PicasaWeb albums/galleries. During the last weeks, Google changed twice the format of the related Web pages and my script could not fetch any picture.

The Bash Debugger Project (bashdb) lets you set breakpoints, inspect variables, perform a backtrace, and step through a bash script line by line. In other words, it provides the features you expect in a C/C++ debugger to anyone programming a bash script.

How to use a Bash Shell script to record the activity of users. This
script is useful in rebuilding the actions of users as they work at
the command line.

What if we could use a bash script to use "apt-get" with Axel (a command line application which accelerates HTTP/FTP downloads by using multiple sources for one file) so the "apt-get" download speed would increase dramatically? Well, you can, thanks to Matt Parnell who has created a bash script which does just that.

The positions of variables in a Bash Shell script may be used by the script as a reference. These built-in parameters are useful methods for building scripts.

Previously I've shown how to use the bash while loop in a bash script. Today I'm going to show how to use another type of do loop in bash: the for loop.

Reading files is no big deal with bash: you just redirect the input to the script or pipe the output of another command into the script, or you could do it inside the script if the file names are pre-determined. You could also use process substitution to pass in the open files (command pipelines actually) from the command line.

Perl and Bash ports of our newbie program to convert binary numbers to decimal. Code written for ease-of-reading, where possible. If you don't script already; start! :)

This post is the second in a series on shell script debugging, error handling, and security. The content of this post will be geared mainly toward BASH users, but there will be information that’s suitable for users of other shells as well. Information such as techniques and methodologies may transfer very well, but BASH specific constructs and commands will not.