Shell scripts are an efficient way to interact with your machine and manage your files and system operations. With just a few lines of code, your computer will do exactly what you want it to do. But you can also use shell scripts for many other essential (and not-so-essential) tasks.

This second edition of Wicked Cool Shell Scripts offers a collection of useful, customizable, and fun shell scripts for solving common problems and personalizing your computing environment. Each chapter contains ready-to-use scripts and explanations of how they work, why you’d want to use them, and suggestions for changing and expanding them. You'll find a mix of classic favorites, like a disk backup utility that keeps your files safe when your system crashes, a password manager, a weather tracker, and several games, as well as 23 brand-new scripts, including:

•  ZIP code lookup tool that reports the city and state

•  Bitcoin address information retriever

•  suite of tools for working with cloud services like Dropbox and iCloud

•  for renaming and applying commands to files in bulk

•  processing and editing tools

Whether you want to save time managing your system or just find new ways to goof off, these scripts are wicked cool!

Review

"This new edition covers a lot of important ground and is well worth that special spot you've on your bookshelf for the book that you need to be able to reach without standing up. This is one of those books you are likely to make very good use of in your Unix work life." - Computerworld

"Whether users want to save time managing their systems or just find new ways to goof off, these scripts are just the ticket." - Linux Journal

About the Author

Dave Taylor has been in the computer industry since 1980. He was a contributor to BSD 4.4 UNIX, and his software is included in all major UNIX distributions. He is an award-winning public speaker and has written thousands of magazine and newspaper articles. He is the author of 20 books, including Learning UNIX for Mac OS X (O'Reilly), Solaris for Dummies (Hungry Minds), and Teach Yourself UNIX in 24 Hours (SAMS). A popular columnist for Linux Journal magazine, he also maintains a customer tech support website at askdavetaylor.com.

Brandon Perry is the author of Gray Hat C#. He started using Linux and writing C# applications with the advent of the open source .NET implementation called Mono. In his free time, he enjoys writing modules for the Metasploit Framework, parsing binary files, and fuzzing things.