If you're not yet comfortable with writing scripts on Unix and Linux systems, this post might get you off to a healthy start. Creating a script on a Unix or Linux system can be dead easy or ...

This Wiley Publishing tome is big (more than 650 pages), useful and very complete. Be warned, however, that its scope is limited to system administration. The purpose of the book is to solve “real ...

Scripting allows shell users to automate repetitive tasks, improving reproducibility, reducing the risk of errors, freeing time, and avoiding boredom. Bioinformatics analysis pipelines may involve ...

A shell is a special user program that provides an interface for the user to use operating system services. Shell accepts human-readable commands from users and converts them into something which the ...

Attaching a remote drive or directory on a Windows box is called “drive mapping” though the process is essentially the same as what we call mounting in the Unix world. While I rarely spend any ...

A file of executable commands for Unix and Linux. Created in a text editor, when the file is run, each command is executed until the end of the file is reached. After the shell script is written, it ...

One particular frustration with the UNIX shell is the inability to easily schedule multiple, concurrent tasks that fully utilize CPU cores presented on modern systems. The example of focus in this ...

An associative array is an array which uses strings as indices instead of integers. To see how associative arrays work, we’re going to look at both the Korn shell and Perl, though only the newest ...