Thursday, July 28, 2011

What is a profile file?

    A profile file is a start-up file of an UNIX user, like the autoexec.bat file of DOS. When a UNIX user tries to login to his account, the operating system executes a lot of system files to set up the user account before returning the prompt to the user.

    In addition to the system settings, the user might wish to have some specific settings for his own account. To achieve this in UNIX, at the end of the login process, the operating system executes a file at the user level, if present. This file is called profile file.

Monday, July 25, 2011

5 important things to follow to become good in shell scripting

       Everybody wants solutions to their problems, and more importantly,  we are now expected to get it faster. One can give faster solutions in Unix when one has a good grip on the command line options, and more importantly scripting languages. There are quite a few of them present: Basic Shell scripting, perl scripting, python, ruby, etc. Though our title reads to become good in shell scripting, we in general are going to discuss how to become good in automating things? Or the kind of outlook one needs to have to go in that direction?

    How can one become good in automation? Is it just books one has to read and master or something more? Let us see in this article 5 different traits if one has can turn things around:

Monday, July 4, 2011

Difference between $x and ${x}

   Many times in shell scripts we would have witnessed two different forms of notations being used against variables: $x and ${x}.  Are they both same or is there any difference between them? Let us discuss in this article:

Let us assign a value to the variable, x:
$ x=10