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Automation is a subject we'll explore multiple times throughout the remainder of the 
book, which will include more advanced subjects such as configuration management. 
Writing scripts is the simplest form of automation, which gives you the ability to type 
commands in a text file and have them all execute. That's what we'll explore next.
Writing simple scripts
This is the section where everything we've talked about so far starts to come 
together. Scripting can be very fun and rewarding, as they allow you to automate 
large jobs or just simplify something that you find yourself doing over and over. The 
most important point about scripting is this: if it's something you'll be doing more 
than once, you really should be making it into a script. This is a great habit to get 
into.
A script is a very simple concept; it's a just a text file that contains commands for 
your shell to execute one by one. A script written to be executed by Bash is known as 
a Bash script, and that's what we'll work on creating in this section.
At this point, I'm assuming that you've practiced a bit with a text editor in Linux. It 
doesn't matter if you use Vim or Nano. Since we've edited text files before (we went 
over that in 
Chapter 5
, 
Managing Files and Directories
), I'm under the assumption that 
you already know how to create and edit files. We'll be using a text editor to create a 
simple script as an example, using the following command:
nano ~/myscript.sh
Inside the file, type the following:
#!/bin/bash
echo "My name is $USER"
echo "My home directory is $HOME"
echo "My default text editor is $EDITOR"
If you weren't already aware, a tilde (
~
) is just a shortcut for a 
user's home directory. Therefore, on my system, the previous 
command would be the same as if I had typed:
nano /home/jay/myscript.sh

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Chapter 6