But Wait... There's More!

This collection is a supplement to my book, The Linux Command Line (TLCL), so if you don't already have a copy, please download one or, if you prefer, pick up a printed copy from your favorite bookseller or library. We are going to build on our experience with the command line and add some more tools and techniques to our repertoire. Like TLCL, this collection is not about Linux system administration; rather it is a collection of topics I consider both fun and interesting. It covers many tools that will be of interest to budding system administrators, but the topics were chosen for other reasons. Some were chosen because they are "classic" Unix, others because they are just "something you should know," but mostly they were chosen because I find them fun and interesting.

The adventures are also available in book form.

Contents

• Midnight Commander

  We will look at Midnight Commander, a character-based directory browser and file manager that bridges the two worlds of the familiar graphical file manager and the common command line tools such as cp, mv, and rm.

• Terminal Multiplexers

  What if we could run multiple terminal sessions inside a single terminal window? Or how about if we could detach a running session and return to it later, on a different machine? Sound impossible? It's not.

• Less Typing

  Fingers getting tired? Wrists starting to ache? Time to learn how do more with less typing.

• More Redirection

  We'll look at I/O redirection again in a little more depth and learn a few tricks along the way.

• tput

  While our command line environment is certainly powerful, it can be lacking when it comes to visual appeal. It doesn't have to be that way. Learn to take control of terminal output and add some visual spice.

• dialog

  We're going to look at dialog, a program that displays various kinds of dialog boxes that we can incorporate into our shell scripts to give them a much friendlier face.

• AWK

  One of the great things we can do in the shell is embed other programming languages within the body of our scripts. In this adventure, we are going to look at one such program, awk, a classic pattern matching and text processing language.

• Other Shells

  While we have spent a great deal of time learning the bash shell, it's not the only game in town. Unix has had several popular shells and almost all are available for Linux, too.

• Power Terminals

  In this adventure, we are going to look at a few of the different terminal programs and the many interesting things we can do with them.

• Vim, with Vigor

  Vim is a very powerful program. In fact, it's safe to say that vim can do anything. It's just a question of figuring out how. In this adventure, we will acquire an intermediate level of skill in this popular tool.

• source

  We looked at source briefly when we worked with the .profile and .bashrc files used to establish the shell environment.

  In this adventure, we will look at source again and discover the ways it can make our scripts more powerful and easier to maintain.

• Coding Standards Part 1

  Most programming organizations have formal standards for coding practice and style. We will look at some and create one of our own.

• Coding Standards Part 2

  There's one problem with having a coding standard. Once you have it, you have to follow it. In this adventure we will learn about new_script, a shell script template generator that performs much of the tedious mechanical work.

• SQL

  Structured Query Language (SQL) is the lingua franca of the database world. It's also a useful and important skill. In this adventure, we will look at its major features and techniques, as well as discover a command-line tool that makes SQL easy to use with our scripts and projects.