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.

This article shows you how to get rid of those unwanted files taking up space in your Ubuntu folders.

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.

Filelight is a little program that analyses your hard drive and shows the Disk Usage in Graphically, It Shows how much space each folder is taking up. Some large temporary files and used iso files will eat your harddisk space. You can easily find which folder is the culprit.

Autotrash is a simple Python script which will purge files from your trash based on their age or the amount of free space left on the device. Using autotrash -d 30 will delete files which have been in the trash for more then 30 days. It uses the FreeDesktop.org Trash Info files included in the new GNOME system to find the correct files and the dates they where deleted.

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.

Tools such as grep, find and awk have often come to the rescue of gleeful Bash-mongers searching for files buried beneath gigabytes of other items. But when a typical Linux distro takes up a couple of gigs of disk space, it's not hard to imagine that finding your files will only become trickier over time.

A simple Bash script to parse Google's PR checksum and return any pages rank from the command line!

When you would like users to interact with the Bash Shell script, you can use case statements to allow them to make choices that create a more intelligent outcome with the script.