There I was, trying to come up with a topic for this column, when I did what I usually do when stumped: I sent a question out to my Twitter followers. This time, I got a great answer, from John ...

I know, there are a million shell scripts waiting to be written to help administer your computer, run your server and fine-tune your back end, but I'm obsessed with scripts that interact with on-line ...

The eval command allows you to run the contents of variables as commands and can be very useful, especially in scripts. There are probably a lot of Linux users who have never encountered the eval ...