What Is a Shell Script, Anyway?

Time was (years ago) when hacking was considered a positive thing. Hackers were people on the cutting edge of computer use, experimenting with and trying novel and unusual solutions to solve existing problems. These were people who changed the way the rest of us looked at computers and computing.

But as the public network became more pervasive, a subset of these hackers started to migrate to remote system break-in missions, with a zeal that rather overwhelmed the rest of us. Nowadays, many consider hacking a bad thing, as in "hacking into the secure Department of Energy database." However, I like to think of hacking as being a more benign, intellectually engaging, and considerably less criminal enterprise, more akin to the wonderful praise a computer aficionado can offer with the compliment "Cool hack!"

This book is about cool shell script hacks.