Basic Shell Scripting

Posted on by Mark McDonnell 23 mins read

Introduction

The unix command line has a hundred or so commands, and a small majority of those you can realistically find yourself using on a regular basis. In this post I want to cover some common commands that can actually be quite useful to you.

Shell commands aren’t something you can cover in one post. Entire books have been written on the subject. So don’t expect anything other than the bare bone basics here, which should hopefully give you enough of an understanding to take your own learning forward.

So let’s begin…

Basics

OK, so I’ll assume you have absolutely no prior command line experience which means we need to start at the basics.

So, first things first: open up your shell (if you’re on a Mac then this will be your Terminal.app application.

What directory am I currently in?

pwd - this stands for “Print Working Directory”

How can I see what’s in this directory?

ls - this tells the shell to list out any files or folders in the current working directory.

You can also tell the command a directory path you want it to look inside of: ls ~/Desktop (this will list all files and folders on your desktop).

ls -l - the -l flag tells the command to stack the list when it prints its output to the shell.

ls -la - this is a combination of the previous flag and the -a flag which means “show all files” (by this I mean, it’ll show you hidden files).

Moving around

To move around your file system you use the ‘change directory’ command cd.

So: cd ~/Desktop will put you in the Desktop.

You can also use relative paths such as cd ../ which will take you up one level from wherever you happen to be.

Displaying content of a file

The cat command is a concatenation command, meaning that if you ran cat original.txt new.txt it would display on your screen the combination of the content from both files specified.

So, with that understanding we can use cat original.txt (i.e. specifying just a single file) to show the contents of that file.

Copy a file

To copy a file we need the cp command, and we tell it what file to copy and where to copy it to.

So: cp ~/Downloads/test.txt ~/Desktop/test.txt will copy the file test.txt (which is inside our ‘Downloads’ folder) and put the copy on our Desktop.

Move a file

To move a file you need the mv command, and we tell it what file to move and where to move it to.

So: mv ~/Downloads/test.txt ~/Desktop/test.txt will move the file test.txt from our ‘Downloads’ folder onto our ‘Desktop’.

Create a file

To create a file you need the touch command.

So: touch ~/some-test-file.txt will create an empty text file in your home directory

Rename a file

There is no rename command on Unix (although there is in Linux) and so we need to use a trick, the trick being to use the mv command.

So: mv ~/Downloads/test.txt ~/Downloads/new.txt will actually rename the file test.txt to new.txt as we’ve moved the file into the same directory it was already in but with a different name (effectively acting like we renamed it)

Delete a file

To delete a file we need the ‘remove’ command rm.

So: rm ~/Downloads/test.txt will delete our test.txt file.

Delete a directory

To delete a folder we need the ‘remove’ command rm again but this time we need to pass in a couple of flags to the command.

The first flag is -f which means ‘force’ the removal (otherwise if you try to remove a folder then the shell will try and prevent this as it’ll assume you’ve made a mistake, and deleting a whole folder could be a big mistake if you’re not careful).

The second flag is -r which means ‘recursively’. So you’ll recursively delete files within the folder.

So: rm -rf ~/Desktop/some-folder will delete our some-folder folder on the Desktop.

Create a directory

To create a directory you can use the make directory command mkdir my_folder_name

To make creating lots of sub directories easier you can pass a -p flag like so mkdir -p Assets/{Scripts,Styles} (notice we use interpolation {} which lets use specify multiple folder names in the current directory level).

Find (searching for files)

The find command is useful for walking a directory hierarchy and returning a list of files found based on a set of criteria you have determined.

The most common pattern is to search for a particular file (or file type) within a project folder. Imagine you want to find a file called package.json within your project directory which is inside your home directory. Here is how we’d use the find command to do that:

# first we'll set-up the project directory and some files...

cd ~/ # move in to the user's home directory
mkdir project-foobar # make our project directory
cd project-foobar # move inside the project directory
touch test.txt {package,blah}.json # this creates 3 files inside our project directory
ls # => blah.json   package.json    test.txt
cd ../ # move back into the user's home directory and we'll start searching

# here is the actual 'find' command
find ./project-foobar -name 'package.json' # => ./project-foobar/package.json

find ./project-foobar -name '*.json'
# => ./project-foobar/blah.json
# => ./project-foobar/package.json

As you can see from the above example the find command has three parameters:

  • the directory to search
  • an optional flag to indicate what we want to search for
  • the file we’re searching for

Let’s see this broken down:

  • ./project-foobar the directory to search
  • -name the flag/option we’ve set is “check the name of each item found”
  • '*.json' we’ve used a wildcard (asterisk *) to indicate we’re interested in “any” json file

Recursive searching

To recursively search for content you need to quote the glob you use:

find . -name '*.go'

Process results

If you want to process the results you get, without a pipe, then use -exec <utility> \;

find . -name '*.go' -exec grep 'my_pattern_im_searching_for' {} \;

Note: where {} is a placeholder for the file path

You’ll see the \; at the end indicates the end of the command. You need to escape the ; otherwise it won’t work. Also you can replace it with \+ which appends file paths. The reason you’d use this is if you want to execute your specified utility command once and have all matching file paths added as arguments. Whereas \; means it’ll execute the command once for each file matched.

Finding files over a certain size

# all files greater than 1mb
find $HOME/. -size +1024k 

# all files inside current directory greater than 500k
find . -name '*.js' -size +500k 

# find all files larger than zero but less than 500bytes
find . -size +0 -a -size -500c # (-a is AND, -c is bytes) 

# find all all files larger than zero OR (-o) any that haven't been accessed in over a year
find . -size 0 -o -atime +365

Grep (Searching for patterns)

Grep is a command that lets you find a pattern (either a string or a regular expression) inside of a file or list of files.

So: grep 'something' test.txt looks for the word ‘something’ inside of the file test.txt.

To use grep on a directory of files then we need to use an additional flag: -r which means ‘recursive’ (similar to the rm command we saw previously).

So: grep -r 'something' ~/Desktop looks for the word ‘something’ inside of any files on the Desktop.

Sed (Find and Replace)

The sed command stands for (S)tream (Ed)itor and allows you to read in the contents of a file and then write the modified output to another file or pipe it through to another I/O command (we’ll cover piping later).

A basic example of its use would be: sed s/day/night/ novel.txt

This replaces the first occurrence of ‘day’ to ’night’. If we wanted to replace multiple occurrences then you would need to pass a g flag (meaning global) to the regular expression like so: sed s/day/night/g novel.txt

Sed is very powerful and there are many features of the syntax that I don’t use. One that’s interesting is that you can use regular expressions to match a pattern and then do stuff with the matches, such as deleting the line or duplicating it.

Consider the following example:

echo "hi there\nmark\nit's nice to\nmeet you" > test.txt

If we now run the following sed command we should see the line that has the word mark is deleted:

cat test.txt | sed '/mark/d'

If we run the following sed command we should see any lines that start with i are duplicated (remove the carrot symbol ^ to see any lines that have the character i duplicated; regardless of whether they’re at the start of the line or not):

cat test.txt | sed '/^i/p'

You can also ’edit in place’ if you’re feeling brave:

find . -name '*.go' -exec sed -i '' 's/<patten>/<replacement>/' {} \;

Awk (Looping Logic)

The awk command reads in each line of a file and splits the line into fields (using whitespace - space, tab - as its default delimiter).

You can then execute commands for each line and reference each field.

A basic example of its use would be: awk '{ print $1 }' which means “print the first field found in the current line”.

So imagine you have the following test.txt file…

This is my first line
This is my second line
This is my third line

…you could print the line number followed by a specific word (in this case the second from last word on each line) using the following awk command: awk '{ print "Line " NR ": " $(NF-1) }' test.txt

Which would display the following content on your screen…

Line 1: first
Line 2: second
Line 3: third

Let’s break this command down a little…

  • Awk commands are placed inside of single quotes awk 'commands go here'.
  • Inside the single quotes we need a set of brackets to place our specific code we want to run: awk '{ code to run here }'
  • We specifically tell awk to print something to stdout (i.e. the terminal screen).
  • In this case we tell it to print the text “Line " followed by the current line number NR.
  • As part of the same print command we then tell it to print “: " followed by the second from last number.
  • To do that we use two pieces of syntax $() and NF.
  • NF stands for (N)umber of (F)ields.
  • The $() wrapping around NF is our ‘process substitution’. This means we’re not just outputting some data but manipulating it by using logic to give us 1 field back from the last, hence it needs to be wrapped in $()

Piping I/O

The previous commands awk, sed, grep are all really useful, but it’s when you can combine them that their true power shines.

Input and Output

Unix is based on the principle of “input” and “output” (known as “I/O”). In the Shell you have stdin (standard input) and stdout (standard output).

By default, stdin is your keyboard (i.e. whatever you type into the terminal shell) and stdout is the terminal (i.e. your screen).

Redirection

Once you understand stdin and stdout you can start to look at redirecting them.

For example when using the sed command you could use redirection to not overwrite your original file and instead direct the output stdout coming from the sed command to another file: sed s/day/night/g original.txt > new.txt

Piping

Another way to direct input and output is to use pipes | (a vertical bar).

A really simple example would be: look at the sed command we used earlier (sed s/day/night/ novel.txt). Rather than actually execute it and have it make the specified change to our file novel.txt we could instead test the command to make sure it does what we expect it to.

To do that we would use the cat command (which we looked at previously) and pipe its output through to the sed command like so…

cat original.txt | sed s/day/night/g

So, to clarify how this works: we’re redirecting the cat command’s stdout through to the sed command’s stdin.

In our original sed example we directed the sed command’s stdout to an actual file (novel.txt), but in this case it has no stdout specified so it falls back to the default stdout which in this case is the terminal shell itself.

Hence the results of the sed command (the modified content) are displayed on your screen.

Piping to Vim

One thing I discovered recently (via Crystal Hirschorn) was that you can’t just pipe stdout into Vim unless you add a hyphen/dash - to the end of the command like so: ls | vim -

Otherwise Vim will complain that: Input is not from a terminal

That’s a good one to remember!

Also you can pipe the input into Vim in read-only mode using the -R flag as well: ls | vim -R -

Piping examples

Here are three real world examples I’ve used recently…

phantomjs 2>&1 network-test.js | tee log.txt

In this example I’m executing a PhantomJS script network-test.js but I wanted to capture both the results of the script (which just logs out DNS information into the terminal) and any errors that may have occurred into a log text file.

The way it works might be a little confusing as it shows some things you might not have seen before: 2>&1 and tee.

Those two commands may look confusing but it just comes down to understanding the numbers that are associated with specific processes, so…

  • 0 = stdin
  • 1 = stdout
  • 2 = stderr

…this means 2>&1 is saying direct 2 (any errors) through to 1 (standard output).

We then pipe the stdout through to the tee command which copies it into a file called log.txt.

ls File-* | sed 's/\(File-[^-]*\)-\(.*\)/mv & \1\2/' | sh

In this example I’m trying to remove a hyphen - from some file names.

The files I have look like File-A-B.gif and I want them to be renamed to File-AB.gif.

So first I list out any files in the current directory that begin File- and then pipe those results through to sed.

Sed then uses Regular Expressions to store a reference to the opening part of the file name (in this case File-A) and then stores the end part of the file name (in this case B.gif).

In the second part of the sed command, instead of doing a ‘replace’ of what we’ve found, we actually pass in a mv command (remember from before that we can rename a file by using mv original.txt new.txt). In this case the stored references to the beginning and ending parts of the file’s name can be referenced within the replacement section using \1 and \2 (and the & in regular expressions means, the original string being inspected).

So when we use mv & \1\2 we’re saying “move the original file and move it to the same directory but using the new name of File-AB.gif (remember \1 is “File-A” and \2 is “B.gif”).

Finally, because the sed command’s replacement is an actual command rather than just a string replacement we pipe that replacement content (which is now sed’s stdout) over to the sh bin command to execute and hence actually rename the file(s).

Note: whenever you write a shell script, you would store it (for example) inside a file with the extension of sh and then you’d use the terminal command sh to execute that shell script.

tmux ls | cut -d : -f 1 | xargs -I {} tmux kill-session -t {}

So in this example I wanted an easy way to destroy all my tmux sessions.

Typically I would run tmux ls to see what sessions I had (it returns something like 0: 1 windows (created Fri Oct 4 18:24:38 2013) [129x33], where the opening 0 is the number/name of the session followed by details about the session -> in this case 1 window, and when it was created, and the size of that window).

Once I had my session number (in this case 0) I could run the command tmux kill-session -t 0 but if I had loads of sessions open I would have to run the same command for all of them.

To fix this I tried using the commands Awk and Sed but discovered an issue with ‘scope’ (which I’m still not 100% sure I understand, but I’ll explain what happened any way)…

I was using tmux ls | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/://g' | xargs -I {} tmux kill-session -t {}. This works, but not when you stick it inside an alias for easy reuse.

The way it works is that it lists out all the tmux sessions and pipes it over to Awk.

Awk then grabs the first field 0: (remember Awk splits the input line into ‘fields’ using a space delimiter). We then pipe that over to Sed.

Sed then uses a regular expression to remove the : from the 0: leaving us with just 0. We then pipe that through to xargs.

xargs runs our kill-session command and passes through the value of 0 into that command using the placeholder {}.

We define what the placeholder will be using -I so we could of used -I target instead if we wanted to like so: tmux ls | awk '{print $1}' | sed 's/://g' | xargs -I target tmux kill-session -t target and it would of achieved the same.

Like I say, this works. But I wanted it inside an alias so I could easily reuse it (I mean, just try and memorise that massive chunk of commands!?). The moment it went into an alias the xargs failed to work because instead of getting 0 it got the entire line 0: 1 windows (created Fri Oct 4 18:24:38 2013) [129x33]. The scope of the argument was being lost some how? A bit annoying really.

My colleague at BBC News (Simon Thulbourn - all round command line wizard, amongst many other technical talents) helped me understand a more efficient and fully functioning version (i.e. it can be safely aliased): tmux ls | cut -d : -f 1 | xargs -I {} tmux kill-session -t {}.

So the only difference here is instead of using both Awk and Sed, we’re just using Cut. I’ve not mentioned it before but cut works like this:

Cut splits the input into fields (like Awk does). We then tell it that we want the fields to be split by : (that’s the -d : section). Then finally we use -f 1 to say we want the first field, which we pipe over to xargs. Otherwise the rest of the command is the same as before.

Nice huh!

Sequences and Parallelism

The use of && between commands means the commands are run in a sequence. So for example, if you run x && y the y command will not be run until x has finished (this is similar to using the semicolon to make commands run sequentially x; y).

The use of a single & between commands means the commands are run in parallel (meaning they don’t wait for each other). So for example, x & y will mean x and y both run at the same time.

Processes

Each command you execute is a “process”. So when we execute the command vim (which opens up the Vim text editor) we have effectively started up a new “process”.

Viewing processes

To view a list of all processes currently running across the system use the ps command (you can also use ps aux).

If you’re only interested in processes within your current terminal tab then use the jobs command.

Moving processes between the fore/background

To background a process (e.g. while we have Vim open, if we wanted to move back to the terminal) then we could execute the command <C-z> (which means pressing the <Ctrl> and z keys at the same time).

To then bring the latest process (i.e. the last process that was put into the background) to the foreground again you would run the command fg.

If you have multiple processes in the background then you can look up the processes using job and then pick one and foreground it using the command fg %n where n is the number of the job.

Miscellaneous Commands

tee

The tee command you’ve seen already now (in our above example) but just to reiterate its use, here is how the manual describes it…

The tee utility copies standard input to standard output, making a copy in zero or more files.

dig

The dig command is used for carrying out DNS lookups: dig integralist.co.uk returns the DNS records found for my domain name.

ps

The ps command stands for (p)rocess (s)tatus

It shows you all running processes on your computer.

You can use piping again to narrow down the results to something in particular you know is causing your computer to slow down and then execute another command to kill that process.

So: ps aux | grep ruby

In the above example we also pass aux which basically specifies table of results that should be returned (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ps_(Unix) for more information).

We then pipe that through to grep and tell it we’re interested only in processes that have the text ruby somewhere (that way we can narrow down the results printed to the screen).

Finally to kill a particular process you’ll need its PID number (which ps aux would have displayed) so locate that PID and then run kill -9 xxxx where xxxx is the PID number you want to stop.

xargs

I know we’ve covered Xargs already in my previous examples, but it’s worth mentioning that you can also use the -0 flag which helps with some commands that won’t work when passed arguments that have spaces in them (imagine a file name with spaces). Using the -0 flag resolves that issue.

Also, if the command you want to run only excepts a single argument (for example echo 123) then you can omit the -I {} placeholder definition.

cut

Again, we’ve covered Cut above already, but just to note that you can change the field delimiter using -d (e.g. -d , would split the line on commas).

Also, -f allows a range, not just a single field index. So if you wanted fields 3 to 4 you could do -f 3,4

Another feature of cut is the -c flag which cuts based on ‘character position’ rather than ‘fields’ like -f does.

One way you could use the -c flag is to remove whitespace at the start and end of a line like so…

echo " xyz " | cut -c 2- | rev | cut -c 2- | rev

…notice our text “xyz” has one character of white space at the start and end. So we specifically tell cut to start at character 2 x and cut until the end of the line 2- and then we use the rev command which reverses the content so it becomes " zyx” and then we again cut from the 2nd character (this time z) and cut until the end of the line and finally we reverse the line one more time so we’re back to where we were initially but with the white space removed.

There are probably more elegant ways to achieve this but it gives you an indication of how you might want to use a command in unique ways.

tr

The tr command stands for ’translate characters’ and it allows you to change the characters in a string of text into a different set of characters. For example…

echo "foo\nbar\nbaz" | tr "bf" "\!"

…here we’re saying: “any occurance of the letters ‘b’ and ‘f’ that are found in the string ‘foo\nbar\n\baz’” should be replaced with a !.

Notice also the \n (new line) character within our string, which means that when tr executes and loops over the string it’ll see this single line as three individual lines; foo on the first line, bar on the second line and baz on the third line.

The result would be…

!oo
!ar
!az

We can also invert the translation; so we can say “any occurance of a letter that ISN’T ‘b’ or ‘f’ then translate them into an ‘!’”. For example,

echo "foo\nbar\nbaz" | tr -c "bf" "\!"

This is done using the -c flag/option. But now if we look at the result you’ll find it hasn’t quite done what we’d expect”

f!!!b!!!b!!!%

As you can see we’ve not catered for our \n new lines that were within our original string. The tr command has seen the new lines and replaced them with an ! because as far as it’s concerned a new line isn’t either a ‘b’ or ‘f’ character.

So we’ll need to tweak our command slightly to accommodate our need to keep the new lines:

echo "foo\nbar\nbaz" | tr -c "bf\n" "\!"

Which result in:

f!!
b!!
b!!

The last thing I want to show you is the ‘squeeze’ command which you use by adding the -s flag/option. What this does is any consecutive letters (e.g. the ‘o’ in “fooobar” is repeated consecutively) will be reduced to a single replacement. For example,

echo "fooobar" | tr -s "o" "\!"

Results in:

f!bar

Whereas if we didn’t use the squeeze command we would’ve seen f!!!bar instead (notice the ‘o’ was translated multiple times)..

du

The du command stands for “disk usage” and it will display the amount of space a directory occupies:

du -s -k ~/*

The -s flag displays an entry for each specified file, while the -k flag displays block counts in 1024-byte (1-Kbyte) blocks.

Meaning running the above command will result in the following output (for me anyway):

0/Users/markmcdonnell/Applications
1355232/Users/markmcdonnell/Box Documents (backup)
6987864/Users/markmcdonnell/Box Sync
1931180/Users/markmcdonnell/Code
1488196/Users/markmcdonnell/Desktop
13070884/Users/markmcdonnell/Documents
964816/Users/markmcdonnell/Downloads
3578120/Users/markmcdonnell/Dropbox
17251988/Users/markmcdonnell/Library
0/Users/markmcdonnell/Movies
232/Users/markmcdonnell/Music
1992/Users/markmcdonnell/Pictures
0/Users/markmcdonnell/Public
38075864/Users/markmcdonnell/VirtualBox VMs
56/Users/markmcdonnell/bin
588988/Users/markmcdonnell/db
528/Users/markmcdonnell/lib
2013/Users/markmcdonnell/man
818320/Users/markmcdonnell/src

If we modify the command to pipe over to the sort command, like so du -s -k ~/* | sort -k1nr | less, then we can make the feedback a little bit more useful (i.e. the directories are sorted by overall size!):

du: 
38075864        /Users/markmcdonnell/VirtualBox VMs
17253304        /Users/markmcdonnell/Library
13070884        /Users/markmcdonnell/Documents
6987868 /Users/markmcdonnell/Box Sync
3578120 /Users/markmcdonnell/Dropbox
1931180 /Users/markmcdonnell/Code
1488196 /Users/markmcdonnell/Desktop
1355232 /Users/markmcdonnell/Box Documents (backup)
964816  /Users/markmcdonnell/Downloads
818320  /Users/markmcdonnell/src
588988  /Users/markmcdonnell/db
1992    /Users/markmcdonnell/Pictures
528     /Users/markmcdonnell/lib
232     /Users/markmcdonnell/Music
56      /Users/markmcdonnell/bin
20      /Users/markmcdonnell/man
0       /Users/markmcdonnell/Applications
0       /Users/markmcdonnell/Movies
0       /Users/markmcdonnell/Public

Double exclamation !!

Sometimes you need to execute a command using sudo privileges. If you forget to do this, don’t write out the command again but with sudo at the start. Don’t even use the up arrow key and then move the cursor to the start of the line to type sudo. All you need to do is to run sudo !!. The !! expands to the last command you executed.

Ctrl-r

Rather than try to remember an old command you typed a few hours ago, let the terminal remember for you. If you press <C-r> (which is <Ctrl> and r keys at the same time) then start typing what you think the command was, the terminal will start to autocomplete using your command history. You can even press <C-r> multiple times to start cycling through your command history.

Conclusion

This was a pretty fast paced run through of some different unix commands. As time goes on I’ll update this post to include other commands and real work use cases that I think would be interesting and useful to those readers new to the command line.

If there were any errors or any thing like that then just let me know by pinging me on twitter.

But before we wrap up... time (once again) for some self-promotion 🙊