Chapter 9
Automation

Throughout this book, you’ve used various command-line tools to accomplish tasks faster than you could with a GUI. But when you combine those commands with additional logic, you can create reusable workflows. This is the key to unlocking the command line’s full potential and a great way to increase your productivity.

To create these workflows, you create scripts, which are lists of instructions or commands you want to run, in the order you want to run them. Every command you’ve used so far is something you can use in your own scripts. Whether you need to install multiple software packages, create complex file structures, merge a bunch of JavaScript files together, or compile and release software, you can write a script to make that happen.

You’re going to work with two common approaches to creating workflows in this chapter. You’ll start off working with make, a task-oriented workflow tool often used to compile software. make is a perfect tool for producing output from some input. Then, you’ll turn your attention to writing shell scripts, which gives you more flexibility than make.