Featured Geek Archives

Reliam's most important asset is our talented team of Internet Application Engineers. Every month exceptional individuals from our team are featured. They discuss issues or solutions that are dear to the featured geeks heart at the present moment. These issues just might be dear to your heart too.

Using Bash to Glue UNIX

By Nathan Rich, Internet Application Engineer

August 2, 2008 - Much like Perl is the glue language for programmers, BASH scripting is the glue language for UNIX and Linux operating systems themselves. When I was learning linux concepts I started by mastering BASH. I purchased the book, “Learning the BASH Shell” and went to work studying and applying the information within. I love working with BASH because the more you learn it the more you learn about UNIX and Linux's GNU tools. Thus by simply studying and applying one relatively easy language, you learn all of the common elements of interacting with UNIX and Linux.

BASH stands for Bourne-again shell. Basically it’s the expanded and improved version of the original shell used to interface with UNIX. Even the original shell is extremely powerful when compared to other shells like Microsoft’s DOS command shell.

With BASH, automation of commands can be achieved in ways unparalleled by GUI systems. I remember when I was first dabbling in computers I loved being able to make things run automatically using DOS batch files which essentially could only do some flow control and whatever commands you could type in your command shell. So, it was awesome to me at the time, but after learning much BASH it really seems to be archaic.

Using BASH, tasks like building a new system, configuring existing systems and evaluating systems can all be done on the fly. Another interesting thing about BASH is that most of its functions can be used on virtually all UNIX and linux systems, including pre-installation environments, so scripts can be made for pre-installation environments such as the Anaconda environment which allows for advanced logic before automatically choosing install options such as packages and configurations, tailor made for the specific machine the installer is running on.