As the author of a bunch of books on Unix and shell script programming (most recently Teach Yourself Unix in 24 Hours and Wicked Cool Shell Scripts) I see a lot of interesting questions about how to be more efficient with the Unix / Linux command line and how to do neat things in shell scripts. In fact, I have an entire category on my weblog all about Shell Script Programming if you’re really into it.

Last night I received two questions within minutes of each other, and both are great examples of how the Linux operating system is powerful and fun to work with:

• How to delete directories in Linux
• Can shell scripts check User ID?

Here’s another helpful tip too: both of these are directly applicable to Mac OS X users too, since modern Macs have a complete and fully capable Unix operating system neatly tucked behind the beautiful Aqua graphical interface!

[tags]linux,unix,shell script programming[/tags]