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

Summary

Unix and Linux are very flexible when it comes to manipulating text. Most configuration settings are stored in text format, in a tool-independent way, so that any number of tools may be used to manipulate them. This gives the user and systems administrator great power, as they are not locked into a single tool for editing /etc/hosts and another custom tool for editing /etc/passwd. Instead, a whole suite of tools is available for manipulating just about anything, and those tools can be combined in all sorts of different ways. This clear design decision to make everything open and accessible is a key strength of the Unix model.

The next chapter builds on this and the previous chapter, and looks at practical systems administration tasks.