You need to package up a bunch of files, send them somewhere, and do something with them at the destination. It isn’t an uncommon scenario. The obvious answer is to create an archive — a zip or tar ...

Discover the techniques that help popular scripts succeed.

Oh happy day! I got an e-mail from a reader with a shell script question that didn't appear to be homework from a programming class or anything to do with hacking passwords. The reader wrote: I am ...

I'm guessing that each of us uses the command line differently and seeks to accomplish different tasks. Mine are sometimes very specialized, like the script I wrote that lets me easily transform the ...

It hurts to see your programs taken apart and their weaknesses exposed, but it will make you a better programmer.

Keep each script version focused on a single change type (patches for fixes, minors for features, majors for breaking changes). Retain all prior versions and never modify an existing release; copy to ...