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 ...

Check if a file is really a file, whether a string contains anything, and whether you can run a program with these vital patterns.

Last month, we took a strange turn and actually just focused on the basics of shell scripting, special variable notation, rather than solving some complex and obscure scripting challenge. I'm going to ...