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You're reading from  Mastering Bash

Product typeBook
Published inJun 2017
Reading LevelIntermediate
PublisherPackt
ISBN-139781784396879
Edition1st Edition
Languages
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Author (1)
Giorgio Zarrelli
Giorgio Zarrelli
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Giorgio Zarrelli

Giorgio Zarrelli is a passionate GNU/Linux system administrator and Debian user, but has worked over the years with Windows, Mac, and OpenBSD, writing scripts, programming, installing and configuring services--whatever is required from an IT guy. He started tinkering seriously with servers back in his university days, when he took part in the Computational Philosophy Laboratory and was introduced to the Prolog language. As a young guy, he had fun being paid for playing games and write about them in video game magazines. Then he grew up and worked as an IT journalist and Nagios architect, and recently moved over to the threat intelligence field, where a lot of interesting stuff is happening nowadays. Over the years, he has worked for start-ups and well-established companies, among them In3 incubator and Onebip as a database and systems administrator, IBM as QRadar support, and Anomali as CSO, trying to find the best ways to help companies make the best out of IT. Giorgio has written several books in Italian on different topics related to IT, from Windows security to Linux system administration, covering MySQL DB administration and Bash scripting.
Read more about Giorgio Zarrelli

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The case statement

When you are given more alternatives, you can process them with a sequence of if else statements:

if [condition];
then
command
else
command
fi

The if clauses can be nested if needed, but in the long run, having more than a few choices messes up the code, making it less readable. One of the basic mantras of coding is exactly keeping the code readable, making it elegant since elegance here does not simply mean beautiful, but also consistent over time. Always keep a meaningful indentation so that the clauses will outstand. Try to use as little code as you can, adopt the same notation all through your script, and make it all compact and lean. So, having a cascade of if/then/else/fi with a lot of indentation cannot show up as the optimal decision for your script, but there is an alternative available and it is widely adopted to create user menus and process the data provided...

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Mastering Bash
Published in: Jun 2017Publisher: PacktISBN-13: 9781784396879

Author (1)

author image
Giorgio Zarrelli

Giorgio Zarrelli is a passionate GNU/Linux system administrator and Debian user, but has worked over the years with Windows, Mac, and OpenBSD, writing scripts, programming, installing and configuring services--whatever is required from an IT guy. He started tinkering seriously with servers back in his university days, when he took part in the Computational Philosophy Laboratory and was introduced to the Prolog language. As a young guy, he had fun being paid for playing games and write about them in video game magazines. Then he grew up and worked as an IT journalist and Nagios architect, and recently moved over to the threat intelligence field, where a lot of interesting stuff is happening nowadays. Over the years, he has worked for start-ups and well-established companies, among them In3 incubator and Onebip as a database and systems administrator, IBM as QRadar support, and Anomali as CSO, trying to find the best ways to help companies make the best out of IT. Giorgio has written several books in Italian on different topics related to IT, from Windows security to Linux system administration, covering MySQL DB administration and Bash scripting.
Read more about Giorgio Zarrelli