Making your script responsive

Tutorials – Shell Scripting

Article from Issue 221/2019
Author(s):

Knowing the right shell commands may be all the artificial intelligence you need to make your computer work for you.

If each computer program could only perform one, unchangeable sequence of actions, software and computers would be almost useless compared to what they can do today. For this reason, every programming language since the invention of vacuum tubes has keywords and syntax structures that allow the programmer to implement flow control.

In a nutshell, flow control is the capability of a program to autonomously understands which actions to perform, or repeat, according to the current values of variables.

Of course, the kind of autonomous decision making you can implement with shell flow control is no artificial intelligence. However, if shell flow control is inadequate for what you need to do, that is a sign that a shell script might not be the right solution for your problem.

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