Wicked Cool Shell Scripts, 2nd Edition

Book excerpt: 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!