SAMS Teach Yourself Red Hat® Fedora™ 4 Linux® All in One

Adding to Your Command Repertoire

Shell scripting is a way of building new, custom-made commands for yourself out of existing Linux tools and commands. Using shell scripts, you can shorten tasks that normally involve many steps into just one step—which you design.

Before you begin shell scripting, it will be helpful to become familiar with a few Linux commands that you haven't learned about in previous chapters of this book. Each of these commands can make your life easier when you're shell scripting.

Memorizing this information isn't important. Just become familiar enough with it that you have a general idea about which commands you can use for specific tasks in Linux.

Sending Text to Standard Output with echo

The echo command is simple; this ...