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Linux Shell Scripting Essentials

Linux Shell Scripting Essentials

By : Sinny Kumari
4.5 (2)
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Linux Shell Scripting Essentials

Linux Shell Scripting Essentials

4.5 (2)
By: Sinny Kumari

Overview of this book

Shell scripting is a quick method to prototype complex applications or problems. Shell scripts are a collection of commands to automate tasks, usually those for which the user has a repeated need, when working on Linux-based systems. Using simple commands or a combination of them in a shell can solve complex problems easily. This book starts with the basics, including essential commands that can be executed on Linux systems to perform tasks within a few nanoseconds. You’ll learn to use outputs from commands and transform them to show the data you require. Discover how to write shell scripts easily, execute script files, debug, and handle errors. Next, you’ll explore environment variables in shell programming and learn how to customize them and add a new environment. Finally, the book walks you through processes and how these interact with your shell scripts, along with how to use scripts to automate tasks and how to embed other languages and execute them.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)
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9
Index

Temporary files


Temporary files are the files that are needed for a short interval of time while an application is running. Such files are being used to keep intermediate results of running a program and they are no longer needed after the program execution is complete. In shell, we can create temporary files using the mktemp command.

Creating a temporary file using mktemp

The mktemp command creates a temporary file and prints its name on stdout. Temporary files are created by default in the /tmp directory.

The syntax of creating a temporary file is as follows:

$ mktmp
/tmp/tmp.xEXXxYeRcF

A file with the name tmp.xEXXxYeRcF gets created into the /tmp directory. We can further read and write into this file in an application for temporary use. Using the mktemp command instead of using a random name for a temporary filename avoids accidental overwrite of an existing temporary file.

To create a temporary directory, we can use the -d option with mktemp:

$ temp_dir=mktemp -d
$ echo $temp_dir
/tmp...
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