If I ever wrote a script myself, it would be strongly emotional material. Jim Parsons
Prerequisite
You need to automate something highly repetitive with files in linux.
Goal of this tutorial
Learn how to create a text file and make it executable in a unix (i.e. linux or Mac) environment.
Step-by-step guide
- Create an empty text file
- Copy-paste the script in it, and save.
- Make the file executable
- Execute it.
- Pass arguments to a script.
Create an empty text file
Open a terminal, change to a directory of interest and type gedit <enter>. This opens a "notepad-like" window in which you can enter text.
Copy-paste a script in it
This can be a script found anywhere on this site or on the www. It usually starts with a line like #!/bin/bash
Save the file (Ctrl+S). Give it the name you like (your_file_name below).
Make the file executable
Enter the following in the terminal
chmod +x your_file_name
chmod stands for "change mode".
Execute it
in the terminal, type
./your_file_name
The "./" at the beginning is the path to your file. "." in linux language often means "here", that is the directory you are in right now (aka current directory).
If you want to run this script from elsewhere, type the full path of the file. For instance:
/home/yourusername/scripts/your_file_name
Pass arguments to a script
Any script can take "arguments". These are passed as a space-separated list, as follows:
./your_file_name file.fif option1
"file.fif" and "option1" are the two arguments here.
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