Section 1.5. What You Still Don t Know

1.5. What You Still Don't Know

The shell is a powerful language in its own right. While you think of it mostly as a command interpreter used for running other commands, it is, in fact, a language, complete with variables, logic and looping constructs. We are not suggesting that you write your application in shell scripts, but you will find it useful for automating many repetitive tasks. There is so much that can be done with shell scripts that we encourage you to read more about this and to talk with other Linux users.

Linux is replete with so many different commands. Some are powerful languages like awk and perl, others are simple handy utilities like head, tail, sort, tr, and diff. There are hundreds of other commands that we don't even have time to mention.