After reading this chapter, you will understand what process is in a Linux and UNIX-based system. You should now know how to create, stop, terminate, and monitor processes. You should also know how to send signals to a process and manage the received signals in your shell script with the trap command. You have also learned how different processes communicate with each other using IPC on mechanism in order to share resources or to send and receive messages.

In the next chapter, you will learn about the different ways in which tasks can be automated and how they run at a specified time without any further human intervention. You will also learn how and why start-up files are created, and how to embed other programming languages such as Python in a shell script.