Writing and Executing Scripts
What is a script? If you’re not a programmer, it can all be rather puzzling. A script is a set of instructions to do something, which are executed by the computer. To demonstrate what happens, get your computer to show its command-line prompt, start up a word processor, and type:
#! /bin/sh echo "have a nice day"
Save this as fred, and make it executable by doing:
chmod +x fred
Run it with the following:
./fred @echo off echo "have a nice day"
The odd first line turns off command-line echoing (to see what this
means, omit it). Save this as the file fred.bat, and run it by typing
fred
.
In both cases we get the cheering message have
a
nice
day
.
If you have never written a program before — you have now. It may
seem one thing to write a program that you can execute on your own
screen; it’s quite another to write a program that
will do something useful for your clients on the Web. However, we
will leap the gap.
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