I worked last 5 months of this year at the media streaming field. I still was a Linux servers maintainer who tries to explore this awesome OS world as much as possible. But the main goal was special and quite different. That goal – servers customization for live stream videos transcoding and broadcast.
We cannot count a Bash as a high-level programming language. Bash scripts don’t perform complicated calculations, hardware access and so on. But we can use it for Linux systems management and orchestration. We’re able to automate routine tasks, wrap CLI applications and just make some fun.
File ~/.bashrc is a simple configuration of Linux user where user can describe all shell instructions necessary for each session. It’s a frequent practice to leave useful command at this file, but aliases and functions looks much more suitable for this configuration file.
Few weeks ago I’ve posted Linux command line utilities list trying to make shell jobs faster. But also there is a vast choice of entertainment applications. Their purposes have a little bit different context. They can replace enormous GUI programs or simply save you from web-browser usage. What could be better to get all features staying on the shell?
If you totally get to the bottom of Linux shell – you’ll agree that it’s a powerful environment. Understanding of things like text manipulators, system utilities etc. makes a great deal in operations performance. But sometimes we have a desire to simplify command line toolkit. Days go by and we’re starting to notice that some mechanisms could be better. Command history search is complicated. “du” scrolling doesn’t show up a descriptive filesystem usage statistics. And sometimes instead of command line we’re picking GUI programs. Despite of we know this way as less productive.
