What the heck is a script?, and what do they do?

well you see when you want to start an application from the command line you type the command. now if you write that command in the file and make that file executabale and then run it then you have got a script for yourself

but of course you have to tell it how to interpret it in the very first line of the file by giving the shell path you want to use

A script...

... when BASIC meets C.


/me is easily amused tonight.

A script is a text file full of commands. The type described above would be a shell script. If you're running bash, its a bash script. The first line of the file tells the shell what kind of script it is, but it isn't necessary unless you want to make it executable and run the script itself as a command.

#!/bin/bash

makes it a bash script. Here are some other script file headers that interpret the files using different languages:

#!/usr/bin/perl
#!/usr/bin/python
#!/usr/bin/matlab
#!/usr/bin/octave

There are dozens, maybe hundreds of scripting languages. But you can write some commands in a file w/o the header and just call the script interpreter directly:

> bash somescript.sh
> perl somescript.pl

etc. Its pretty loose and depends on the language in question. Scripts can call other scripts.

-Jeff