My first "real" computer was an IBM PC/XT. While our family had a Commodore 64, I don't think anyone would argue that it was anything but a game machine, at least not the way we used it. Since the XT was my introduction to the Personal Computer market, I got pretty use to IBM and Microsoft DOS (Disk Operating System).
I've never been much of a code hacker/junkie, but I did slap together quite a few batch files to get DOS to save me a few steps. Under Linux you can also script things. Most scripts begin by pointing to whatever shell you're using. I would imagine that a good 60% of the Linux community is using good old Bash. An example bash script:
#!/bin/bash
echo "Shell scripting is fun"
Then you would change permissions on the script to include execute permission, at least for yourself. Be wary of arbitrarily running shell scripts which you don't know the purpose of - you don't want to run a rootkit.
chmod ug+x myshellscript
Now the user who created myshellscript has permission to run it, as does anyone who belongs to the same group as the user.
So what good is all this? When combined with another tool, cron, you can schedule your script to run at certain intervals. I've set up a cron job that runs a script which connects to a ftp server and uploads a web cam image at certain intervals.
I won't go into the details of cron because this post is long enough, but the links below should help.
Resources:
Cheers until next time!
