In this post I'll show you how to create a self extracting bash script to automate the installation of files on your system. This script requires coreutils (for cat, tail), awk, gzip, tar and bash.

For more about built-ins, refer to “How to tell if you’re using a bash builtin”. The first line of a bash script is usually #!/bin/bash and indicates that the script will be run using bash.

If you are a traditional programmer, using bash for scripting may seem limiting ... and sometimes it is just easier to make a call to an awk or Python script to do the heavy lifting.

Let me first tell you about three important tools I use in this script: I'm assuming you already are familiar with standard UNIX command-line tools, including head and awk. With these tools, you can ...

In our first tutorial on command line wizardry, we covered simple redirection and the basics of sed, awk ... than Bash scripting. If you need to write a script for repeated use—particularly ...