Introduction

Although you may think that you have learned to master Linux command line with bash shell, there are always some new tricks to learn to make your command line skills more efficient. This article will teach you a few more basic tricks on how to make your life with the Linux command line & bash more bearable and even enjoyable.

Bash Command History Expansion

This section will mostly deal with bash shortcuts in combination with three bash history expansion characters “!”, “^” and “#”. Bash Command History Expansion character “!” indicates start of history expansion. The “^” is a substitution character to modify a previously run command. The last optional character is “#”, which denotes the reminder of the line as a comment.

Repeat last command

$ echo Bash Shortcuts
Bash Shortcuts
$ !!
echo Bash Shortcuts
Bash Shortcuts

!! is probably the easiest and most popular bash shortcut, which simply shows and executes your last entered command.

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Let’s start by a simple execution example of GNU R Rscript front-end script. Use which command to locate Rscript interpreter:

$ which Rscript
/usr/bin/Rscript

alternatively define your interpreter as /usr/bin/env Rscript

#!/usr/bin/Rscript

print("Hello R")

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Here is a simple GNU R script print a single line:

#!/usr/bin/Rscript

print("hello R")

where or execution output is:

$ ./script.R
[1] "hello R"

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Below you can find some hints on how to count an occurrence of specific character in a file or in a string. Le’s say we have a string “Hello Bash”:

$ STRING="Hello Bash"
$ echo $STRING
Hello Bash

Using bash shell we can now count an occurrence of any given character. For example let’s count number of occurrences of a character l:

$ echo $STRING | sed -e 's/\(.\)/\1\n/g' | grep l | wc -l
2

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The following bash script example we show some of the way how to check for an empty or null variable using bash:

#!/bin/bash 

if [ -z "$1" ]; then
    echo "Empty Variable 1"
fi


if [ -n "$1" ]; then
    echo "Not Empty Variable 2"
fi


if [ ! "$1" ]; then
    echo "Empty Variable 3"
fi


if [ "$1" ]; then
    echo "Not Empty Variable 4"
fi


[[ -z "$1" ]] && echo "Empty Variable 5" || echo "Not empty Variable 5"

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Question

:
My Python program produce a following error message upon execution:

 SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\xc4' in file test.py on line 1, but no encoding declared; 

Answer:

Normally the above error message is displayed by python when other characters other then ASCII are used withing your code. The solution is to either remove all non-ASCII characters or include the bellow line into your code to enable UTF-8 encoding:

# - *- coding: utf- 8 - *-

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In case you wish to automate your things with your gmail email. Here is a simple script on how to access your gmail account with bash script. Before you run the script make sure that curl command is available on your system as this script depends on it. The below script is a great way to quickly check your gmail inbox with a single command. Open your favorite text edit and create a bash script file with some arbitrary file name eg. check_email.sh

#!/bin/bash

username="USERNAME"
password="PASSWORD"
echo
curl -u $username:$password --silent "https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom" |  grep -oPm1 "(?<=<title>)[^<]+" | sed '1d'

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The following is an example on how to pass and access command line arguments which a Python script. Save the following python script to a file eg. python-arguments.py

from sys import argv

name, first, second, third, fourth = argv

print "Script name is:", name
print "Your first argument is:", first
print "Your second argument is:", second
print "Your third argument is:", third
print "Your fourth argument is:", fourth


# Alternatively we can access "argv" argument list directly using range. For exmaple:

# Print all arguments except script name
print argv[1:]

# Print second argument
print argv[2]

# Print second and third argument
print argv[2:4]

# Print last argument
print argv[-1]

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This series of articles is dedicated to development on Linux systems.

This tutorial focuses on C programming and covers such concepts as types, operators and variables, flow control, functions, pointers and arrays, structures, basic I/O, coding style and building a program as well as packaging for Debian and Fedora or getting a package in the official Debian repository.

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