Wicked Cool Shell Scripts: 101 Scripts for Linux, OS X, and UNIX Systems

by Dave Taylor, Brandon Perry

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

Genres: Programming, Technical, Technology, Computers

400 pages, Kindle Edition

Published October 15, 2016

Reviews

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book. Will be a very nice resource for the script I build.

[Pierfrancesco Aiello · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not really a very useful library but the script given give a pointer to look for more (expanding scripts and co). Maybe ultimately really writing a local/public domain library of some shell scripts.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good pieces here and basics. I want more!

[Anders · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the examples make for great tools in themselves and some are quite inspirational. Others already have existing counterparts on most systems or just feels redundant. I know it's hard to find examples for everyone, but I got the feeling of being shown 93 vacation images where 25 would have been better.

The examples themselves are easy to understand, short and to the point. If you find use of a few, but want to improve on them just a little bit, then I think the authors succeeded. If you like this, check out "UNIX Power Tools" as well.

I might sound a bit negative, but 3 stars means "I liked it" and I read it knowing that I'm no longer part of the target group.

[. · Rating 1 out of 5]

Don't buy this book.

Many of example scripts in this book do something poorly that can be done a lot better with piping several commands or by using packages available in most distros. Just do a simple google search.

Also authors have bad coding practics.
You can find a lot better resources online for free.