Bash scripts are powerful, but with power comes great responsibility. It’s very easy for sloppy or poorly-planned code to do real damage, so it’s a good idea to be careful and practice defensive ...

In order to avoid this common mistake I often have my shell scripts prompt me for a yes or no answer before they proceed. The function described here is for doing that: asking a question and ...

I've recently written about using bash arrays and bash regular expressions, so here's a more useful example of using them to test IP addresses for validity. To belabor the obvious: IP addresses are 32 ...

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 ...

Many bash scripts use arguments to control the commands that they will run and the information that will be provided to the people running them. This post examines a number of ways that you can verify ...

FFmpeg was designed as a cross-platform solution for video and audio recording, conversion, and streaming. Its About page describes the command-line tool as “the leading multimedia framework, able to ...

Although bash scripts are regularly maligned, they do have a certain simplicity and ease of creation that makes them hard to resist. But sometimes you really need to do some heavy lifting in another ...