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 ...

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 ...

Dungeons, Dragons and Dice—a script that lets you roll those 3d6 and 2d20 that a surprising number of games require. In my last article, I talked about a really simple shell script for a game called ...

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of , S. Tucker Taft on the , Microsoft about its ...

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 ...

On Unix — the progenitor of Linux — there was /bin/sh. It was simple, by comparison to today’s shells, but it allowed you to enter commands and — most importantly — execute lists of commands. In fact, ...