Scripting the Command Line

Up to this point, we've explored a variety of commands available on the Linux command line. We've learned how to work with files and directories, manage permissions and ownership, and process text in multiple ways.

While these tasks have focused on using the command line prompt, this approach is often temporary and manual. For more complex tasks, or when we want to automate a series of commands, it becomes useful to save them in a file. To achieve this, we need to work with a text editor. Since we're primarily operating in the terminal, we'll focus on terminal-based text editors, which offer several practical options.

In this section, we'll explore some of the most popular terminal-based text editors. We'll start with a historical perspective, beginning with the classic ed editor. From there, we'll move on to more widely-used editors like vim and nano. While I personally prefer vim for its flexibility and power, nano tends to be more accessible for beginners. We'll also touch on a couple of newer, user-friendly editors: micro and tilde.

After we've covered these editors, we'll dive into more advanced text processing techniques using regular expressions. Regular expressions allow us to identify and manipulate patterns in text. Although they're useful directly at the command line, they truly shine when integrated into scripts for automation and complex processing.

With these tools in hand, we'll then move on to creating bash scripts, combining the commands we've learned into efficient, automated workflows.