🔥 Mastering DevOps: Overcoming Linux Challenges with Practical Scripting Tasks

Mastering DevOps requires overcoming various challenges, especially when working with Linux systems. This article presents practical scripting tasks designed to help you tackle these challenges effectively. Here are some tasks to get you started:

🔹 Challenge 1: Write a simple Bash script that prints “Welcome to World of DevOps!” along with the current date and time.
🔹 Challenge 2: Create a script that checks if a website (e.g., https://www.google.com) is reachable using curl or ping. Print a success or failure message.
🔹 Challenge 3: Write a script that takes a filename as an argument, checks if it exists, and prints the content of the file accordingly.
🔹 Challenge 4: Create a script that lists all running processes and writes the output to a file named process_list.txt.
🔹 Challenge 5: Write a script that installs multiple packages at once (e.g., git, vim, curl). The script should check if each package is already installed before attempting installation.

Solution:

✅ Challenge 1: Write a simple Bash script that prints “Welcome to World of DevOps!” along with the current date and time.

Answer : Create Hello_Dev.sh and write code by using Nano command to make changes in file. write #!/bin/bash echo "Welcome to World of DevOps! Today's date and time is : $(date)"

make this file executable by chmod +x Hello_dev.sh command and run this file. you will see the whole terminal commands and output given below

Explanation:

• #!/bin/bash → Shebang to specify Bash as the interpreter.

• echo "Welcome to World of DevOps! Today's date and time is : $(date)"

  • echo prints the message.

  • $(date) fetches the current date and time.

[ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 ~]$ mkdir BashScripts
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 ~]$ cd BashScripts/
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 BashScripts]$ ll
total 0
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 BashScripts]$ nano Hello_dev.sh
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 BashScripts]$ cat Hello_dev.sh 
#!/bin/bash
echo "Welcome to World of DevOps! Today's date and time is : $(date)"
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 BashScripts]$ ls -l
total 4
-rw-r--r--. 1 ec2-user ec2-user 83 Apr 24 07:34 Hello_dev.sh
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 BashScripts]$ chmod +x Hello_dev.sh 
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 BashScripts]$ ls -l
total 4
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 ec2-user ec2-user 83 Apr 24 07:34 Hello_dev.sh
[ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 BashScripts]$ ./Hello_dev.sh 
Welcome to World of DevOps! Today's date and time is : Thu Apr 24 07:34:47 UTC 2025

✅ Challenge 2: Create a script that checks if a website (e.g., https://www.google.com) is reachable using curl or ping. Print a success or failure message.

Explanation:

• #!/bin/bash → Shebang (#!): This tells the system to run the script using bash. This line is required to know which interpreter to use when executing the script.

• You define two variables:

  • website is the full URL to check using curl (which checks if the web server is up and responding to HTTP requests).

  • domain is just the domain part, used with ping to check network-level connectivity.

    # Define the website address to check
    website="https://google.com"
    domain="google.com"

    # Check website availability using curl
    http_code=$(curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" --max-time 5 "$website")

• This line uses curl to silently make a request to the URL and fetch only the HTTP status code:

  • -o /dev/null: Discards the response body.

  • -s: Runs silently (no progress output).

  • -w "%{http_code}": Outputs only the HTTP status code (e.g., 200, 301, 404).

  • --max-time 5: Limits the request to 5 seconds to avoid long waits.

• The result is saved into the variable http_code.

    if echo "$http_code" | grep -qE "200|301|302"; then

• This checks if the status code returned by curl indicates a successful or redirect response:

  • 200 means OK (successful request).

  • 301 and 302 are redirects (still means the server is up).

  • -qE with grep: quiet mode with extended regex.

• If one of those is matched, it proceeds with the success message:

•   if ping -c 2 -W 2 "$domain" > /dev/null 2>&1; then
  

• This runs a ping to check basic network connectivity:

  • -c 2: Send 2 packets.

  • -W 2: Wait up to 2 seconds for a response.

  • > /dev/null 2>&1: Discards both stdout and stderr (silent).

• If ping succeeds, it prints another success message , If both curl and ping fail, it prints a final failure message.

    [ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 BashScripts]$ nano Website_check.sh 
    [ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 BashScripts]$ ls -l
    total 8
    -rwxr-xr-x. 1 ec2-user ec2-user  83 Apr 24 07:34 Hello_dev.sh
    -rwxr-xr-x. 1 ec2-user ec2-user 619 Apr 24 08:12 Website_check.sh
    [ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 BashScripts]$ ./Website_check.sh 
    Success: https://google.com is reachable via curl!
    [ec2-user@ip-172-31-80-217 BashScripts]$ cat Website_check.sh 
    #!/bin/bash

    # Define the website address to check
    website="https://google.com"
    domain="google.com"

    # Check website availability using curl
    http_code=$(curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}" --max-time 5 "$website")

    if echo "$http_code" | grep -qE "200|301|302"; then
        echo "Success: $website is reachable via curl!"
    else
        echo "Curl check failed (HTTP $http_code), trying ping..."

        # Website check using Ping
        if ping -c 2 -W 2 "$domain" > /dev/null 2>&1; then
            echo "Success: $domain is reachable via ping!"
        else
            echo "Failure: Website is not reachable via curl or ping."
        fi
    fi