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 ...

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 ...

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 - ...

Linux, known for its robustness and flexibility, has been a favorite among developers, system administrators, and technology enthusiasts. One of the pillars of Linux's capabilities is its inherent ...

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 ...

Sometimes what seems like the simplest of questions can have you scrambling for answers. Today's seemingly simple question is "How can a bash script identify its own location?" When a question like ...

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 ...

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 ...

How to use a Bash script for-loop for system administration in Linux Your email has been sent Bash scripting remains a staple of my endeavors in Linux as a system administrator, and I use it every day ...