The beauty of shell scripting is that you can easily automate all sorts of tasks on your system without having to learn much in the way of actual programming. To give you an idea of what this looks like, here’s an example of a (completely useless) Bash script that creates a new file, adds some text to the file, outputs the file contents on screen, and then removes the file as if nothing ever happened: #!/bin/bashĮcho 'This file will self-destruct after displaying this message.' > newfile.txtĮcho 'Entirely useless script completed!' That’s what a shell script does in a nutshell, excuse the pun. Instead of typing out each command every time, it makes more sense to put them into a file that can be run all at once, executing each command in the order that you placed them. Let’s say you regularly need to type in several terminal commands one after another for some reason.

The shebang tells the Ubuntu kernel which interpreter to use for the commands, given that /bin/bash points to Bash and /bin/sh points to Dash. You can tell whether a file is intended to be run as a shell script by the presence of what’s called a “shebang” on the first line: either #!/bin/bash or #!/bin/sh. In Ubuntu, the default terminal shell is called Bash, and it’s what you use whenever you enter a command into the terminal. “script.sh”) - that consists of UNIX commands to be run through the terminal shell when you execute it. What are shell scripts, exactly?Ī shell script is a file - usually ending in. If you’ve recently taken up the art of Bash scripting or you’re just trying to figure out how to run a Linux-based shell script you found on the Internet, this walkthrough is for you. In this tutorial, you will learn how to run a shell script in Ubuntu using the native command line terminal.

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