Unix automation

Automating tasks in Unix.

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The unix command line provides an interpreted programming environment. Some things are easier to achieve with a shell script than with a perl program. However, you can get everything done in perl that you can do in a shellscript and that saves you the need to learn yet another syntax.

 

Introductory reading

 

Examples:

Change extensions for many files

To change all .htm files in a folder to .html files:

• using basename to extract the actual filename from a string...

<bash>for f in *.htm; do mv $f `basename $f .htm`.html; done;</bash>

• or, using echo to pipe the filename into sed and applying a regular expression/substitution...

<bash>for f in *.htm ; do mv $f `echo $f | sed 's/\(.*\.\)htm/\1html/'` ; done</bash>

   

Further reading and resources