Hi David,
> 5. Does Linux have the equivalent of DOS batch files?
Yes, as Andrew said, it has shell scripts. The shell is the normal
command-line intepreter that sits on top of the operating system. It's
just a program, like any other, so there are various shells available.
bash is the default, Bourne Again shell, a descendent of the Bourne
shell.
Unlike DOS, bash has control structures like
while [[ -f lockfile ]]; do
sleep 10
done
for f in *.png; do
pngtopnm $f | cjpeg >${f%.png}.jpeg
done
And the general Unix `software tools' philosophy is to have small
programs work well together using text as their common format, with the
linkage between them coming from I/O re-direction and pipelines, like
that | in the for-loop above.
Cheers, Ralph.
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