This course is meant to help junior software or network engineers, or students to take the first steps into the world of bash shell scripting. It will help you develop your own scripts in order to interact efficiently with command line tools.
The course is structured into two sections. The first section covers basic building blocks that allow you to write your own shell scripts. Here you will learn about basic utilities used throughout the course, a simple script structure, defining functions, using input/output redirection, pipes and command substitution. The last lectures in this section focus on control statements, like if, case, while and for.
In the second section I will show you how to build a simple real-life utility for monitoring the amount of traffic on a network interface. There are two scripts involved in this utility. The "core", that queries system data about a network interface and adds it to a comma-separated-values (csv) file, one line at a time. The other one will take care of scheduling the "core" to be run at specific times, based on a user specified interval. The result is a csv file that contains data collected at specific points in time, data that can be later processed into a spreadsheet application (e.g. build graphs from it).