We’ll start by setting up a very simple script, then we’ll move from there and cover how to deal with variables, functions, conditional statements, loops, arrays and how to manipulate text using sed, awk and regular expressions.
Once covered the fundamentals of the bash scripting language we’re going to write three scripts:
•A simple universal archive extractor: this script will allow us to extract any compressed archive (tar.gz, 7z, rar, zip, bz, tbz2 and more) just by typing a command. This script will contain no more than 30 lines of code.
•A batch renaming tool: the script is going to take the folder to process as an argument, then will batch rename all the files in the folder with a given extension. It will then rename all the files in the folder either with a sequential number or with a user supplied keyword, then a sequential number.
•A tool to generate automatic backups based on a schedule: this script is going to generate a tar.gz file by appending the current system date and time to the original folder name provided as an argument, we’ll then proceed to use cron jobs to schedule the script execution based on our preference.
By the end of the course you will be able to write scripts on your own to automate anything in Linux.
