We are still making progress in leaps and bounds in script writing. I hope these ideas stay with you and you find the code examples useful. Functions are very important for the ease of maintenance of your scripts and their ultimate functionality. The easier the scripts are to maintain, the more likely you are to add improvements over time. We can define functions at the command line or within scripts but they need to be included in the script before they are used.

The functions themselves are loaded into memory while the script is running, but as long as the script is forked and not sourced, they will be released from memory once the script is finished. We have touched a little upon sed in this chapter and we will look more at using the stream editor (sed) in the next chapter. The sed command is very powerful and we can make good use of it within scripts.