Bash mid-day session

Part 1: morning materials

  1. Answer any questions.
  2. Go together through the challenges, do some exercises, and debug problems.

Part 2: afternoon materials

  1. Review the program for this afternoon: you have 1h10m of videos to watch.

By the end of the day you should be able to:

  • write a multi-line bash script and function
  • process command-line arguments in this script / function
  • search inside files with grep
  • search the filesystem with find
  • perform basic text manipulation with sed, tr, awk

Some of the hands-on exercises we will do in the last Zoom session:

  • Write a function archive() to replace directories with their gzipped archives.
  • Write a one-line command that will search for a string in all files in the current directory and all its subdirectories, and will hide errors (e.g. due to permissions).
  • Write a one-line command that finds 5 largest files in the current directory and prints only their names and file sizes in the human-readable format (indicating bytes, kB, MB, GB, …) in the decreasing file-size order. Hint: use find, xargs, and awk.