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Bash fundamentals
8 minutes

An understanding of Bash starts with an understanding of Bash syntax. After you know the
syntax, you can apply it to every Bash command that you run.

The full syntax for a Bash command is:

Bash ＝ Copy

command [options] [arguments]

Bash treats the first string it encounters as a command. The following command uses Bash's
ls (for "list") command to display the contents of the current working directory:

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ls

Bash commands are often accompanied by arguments. For example, you can include a path
name in an ls command to list the contents of another directory:

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ls /etc

Most Bash commands have options for modifying how they work. Options, also called flags,
give a command more specific instructions. As an example, files and directories whose names
begin with a period are hidden from the user and are not displayed by ls . However, you can
include the -a (for "all") flag in an ls command and see everything in the target directory:

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ls -a /etc

You can even combine flags for brevity. For example, rather than enter ls -a -l /etc to show

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all files and directories in Linux's /etc directory in long form, you can enter this instead:

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ls -al /etc

Bash is concise. It's sometimes remarkable (and a point of pride among Bash aficionados) how
much you can accomplish with a single command.

Get help
Which options and arguments can be used, or must be used, varies from command to
command. Fortunately, Bash documentation is built into the operating system. Help is never
more than a command away. To learn about the options for a command, use the man (for
"manual") command. For instance, to see all the options for the mkdir ("make directory")
command, do this:

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man mkdir

man will be your best friend as you learn Bash. man is how you find the information that you

need to understand how any command works.

Most Bash and Linux commands support the --help option. This shows a description of the
command's syntax and options. To demonstrate, enter mkdir --help . The output will look
something like this:

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Usage: mkdir [OPTION]... DIRECTORY...

Create the DIRECTORY(ies), if they do not already exist.

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options too.
-m, --mode=MODE set file mode (as in chmod), not a=rwx - umask
-p, --parents no error if existing, make parent directories as needed
-v, --verbose print a message for each created directory
-Z set SELinux security context of each created direc‐
tory
to the default type
--context[=CTX] like -Z, or if CTX is specified then set the SELinux

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or SMACK security context to CTX

--help display this help and exit
--version output version information and exit

GNU coreutils online help: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/>

Report mkdir translation bugs to <http://translationproject.org/team/>
Full documentation at: <http://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/mkdir>
or available locally via: info '(coreutils) mkdir invocation'

Help obtained this way is typically more concise than help obtained with man .

Use wildcards
Wildcards are symbols that represent one or more characters in Bash commands. The most
frequently used wildcard is the asterisk. It represents zero characters or a sequence of
characters. Suppose your current directory contains hundreds of image files, but you only want
to see the PNG files—the ones whose file names end with .png. Here's the command to list
only those files:

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ls *.png

７ Note

Linux has no formal concept of a file-name extension as other operating systems do. This
doesn't mean that PNG files won't have a .png extension. It simply means that Linux
attaches no special significance to the fact that the file names end with .png.

Now let's say the current directory also contains JPEG files. Some end in .jpg, while others end
in .jpeg. Here's one way to list all the JPEG files:

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ls *.jpg *.jpeg

And here is another:

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ls *.jp*g

The * wildcard matches on zero or more characters, but the ? wildcard represents a single
character. If the current directory contains files named 0001.jpg, 0002.jpg, and so on through
0009.jpg, the following command lists them all:

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ls 000?.jpg

Yet another way to use wildcards to filter output is to use square brackets, which denote
groups of characters. The following command lists all the files in the current directory whose
names contain a period immediately followed a lowercase J or P. It lists all the .jpg, .jpeg, and
.png files, but not .gif files:

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ls *.[jp]*

In Linux, file names and the commands that operate upon them are case-sensitive. So to list all
the files in the current directory whose names contain periods followed by an uppercase or
lowercase J or P, you could enter this:

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ls *.[jpJP]*

Expressions in square brackets can represent ranges of characters. For example, the following
command lists all the files in the current directory whose names begin with a lowercase letter:

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ls [a-z]*

This command, by contrast, lists all the files in the current directory whose names begin with
an uppercase letter:

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ls [A-Z]*

And this one lists all the files in the current directory whose names begin with a lowercase or
uppercase letter:

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ls [a-zA-Z]*

Based on all this, can you guess what the following commands will do?

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ls [0-9]*
ls *[0-9]*
ls *[0-9]

If you need to use one of the wildcard characters as an ordinary character, you make it literal
or "escape it" by prefacing it with a backslash. So, if for some reason you had an asterisk as
part of a file name—something you should never do intentionally—you could search for it by
using a command such as:

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$ ls *\**

Next unit: Bash commands and operators

Continue Ｔ

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