Summary

Shell scripting is a very common way of automating periodically running tasks in a Linux system. Sometimes, it evolves to a bigger system chained together with multiple Bash scripts and Python programs to complete complex tasks using multiple smaller tasks that do one thing at the same time in a very reliable way.

In modern systems, you will probably see as much Bash as Python scripts.

In this chapter, we learned how to create an executable script, as well as how to create a simple backup script that handles errors and generates a new filename on each run. We also added a function that removes old backups so that we can avoid filling the disk space. Additionally, as a side effect, we learned how to create a new PostgreSQL database and allow access to it from a local system.

In the next chapter, we’ll learn how to create Linux services and how to manage them.