Shell Scripting: Expert Recipes for Linux, Bash, and More

Chapter 12

File Manipulation

Part II, “Recipes for Using and Extending System Tools,” explores the general tools available in a typical Unix/Linux system in more depth. This chapter covers the common features used on a daily basis, as well as some less well-known features, and provides a few hints and tips for ways that these tools can be used. These chapters will occasionally refer you to the man pages for more information on esoteric options because there is no point in reprinting man pages here. Many of the GNU commands, and particularly the coreutils package, have much better explanations in their info pages than in their respective man pages. If you have info installed on your system, the following is the syntax to read about stat (which is part of the coreutils package):

info coreutils 'stat invocation'

This chapter also covers input and output redirection, which is a reasonably well understood topic for basic redirections but gets a bit more involved when dealing with redirecting input from standard input using here documents, and diverting inputs and outputs from loops and other external commands.