Hello, you beautiful person.
And welcome to this very exciting section of the course all about automating tasks, using batch scripts
and cron.
Now, up until now you've been learning how to do commands one after the other on the command line.
But sometimes, however you want to complete tasks that require multiple steps.
So instead of just memorizing the steps and entering those steps, those command steps, every single
time you need to complete that task, you can instead write those commands into a text file known as
a batch script, and then just run the script.
And when you run the script, each of the commands in the script will be run one after the other from
top to the bottom.
So the shell will start at the top of the script and work its way down through the script, executing
all of the commands on the way.
All right.
So in this section of the course, you're going to learn how to create and run your very own batch scripts,
but you're also going to see how you can schedule those commands and batch scripts to be run at certain
times using a really handy scheduling program called Cron.
Now, batch scripting is a whole massive field in and of itself, so this won't be an overly detailed
section of the course.
But I hope that by the end of the session you'll have the fundamental concepts and understanding of
what batch scripting is all about so that you can start writing your own simple scripts.
You'll also know how to schedule and automate commands and scripts to run at any time you choose by
using cron.
So again, combining these two skills will allow you to truly set your workflow on autopilot.
So now that you've got a quick heads up about what's going to be covered in this section, let's jump
right in in the next video by learning how to write your very own batch scripts.