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 ...

Whenever you have worked out the perfect logic in the script you’re preparing, do one more thing. Take a reusable snapshot of the logic you’ve written and tested and save it in a template for the next ...

The nblock() function reports how many disk blocks the file uses. This calculation is based on the file's size as returned by stat(). The V7 block size was 512 bytes--the size of a physical disk ...

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 ...

Community driven content discussing all aspects of software development from DevOps to design patterns. It’s pretty easy to run a batch file on Windows. Just create a file, change the extension to ...

This post follows up on Part 1 by examining the many ways that you can test the value of variables – e.g., whether they equal particular strings like “yes” or “no”, if they have a numeric value, if ...

It is easy to dismiss bash — the typical Linux shell program — as just a command prompt that allows scripting. Bash, however, is a full-blown programming language. I wouldn’t presume to tell you that ...