A bash (or shell) script is basically a program that allows the user to interact with the UNIX/Linux system by writing executable shell commands in a simple text file.
A bash script which greets the user (save in greet.sh and run like bash greet.sh):
echo "hello $USER"
A bash script which takes a string as input and greets (saved as hello.sh) :
echo "hello $1" # $1 is the first argument given to the script
Output:
hello interviewbit # Run like this: bash hello.sh interviewbit. 'interviewbit' is first argument
Our own version of wc which is more readable (saved as mywc.sh) :
wc_output=`wc /usr/share/dict/words | tr -s ' '` # You can save output of a command in a variable bytes=`echo $wc_output | cut -d ' ' -f 1` # You can then use variable to extract more useful information lines=`echo $wc_output | cut -d ' ' -f 2` words=`echo $wc_output | cut -d ' ' -f 3` filename=`echo $wc_output | cut -d ' ' -f 4` echo "Filename: $filename" echo "Bytes in the file: $bytes" echo "Lines in the file: $lines" echo "Words in the file: $words"
Output (Run as bash mywc.sh):
Filename: /usr/share/dict/words Bytes in the file: 235886 Lines in the file: 235886 Words in the file: 2493109