Don't expose your system with sloppy scripts! Although a Linux desktop or server is less susceptible to viruses and malware than a typical Windows device, there isn't a device on the internet that isn ...

Sandra Henry-Stocker was a programmer, Linux systems administrator, security engineer and Linux journalist for most of her 30-year career. She describes herself as "USL" (Unix as a second language) ...

Bring your GitHub repository to the next level of functionality. For the past year since Microsoft has acquired GitHub, I've been hosting my Git repositories on a private server. Although I relished ...

Last week’s column looked at how we can read from and write to files by associated the files with user-defined file descriptors. This week, we take this idea a bit further. Closing File Descriptors In ...

How to use a Bash script for-loop for system administration in Linux Your email has been sent Bash scripting remains a staple of my endeavors in Linux as a system administrator, and I use it every day ...

Some of the most versatile commands you can run on the Linux command line are those that enable you to pass the output of one command to another by using something called a “pipe”. You can also set up ...

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 ...

Each Linux command returns an exit code, with 0 indicating success and non-zero values indicating failure. You can use the $? variable to access the exit code and control program flow in scripts. Be ...