[ Thanks to Jamie
Adams for this link. ]
“Over the years, I’ve written hundreds, if not
thousands, of shell scripts. With the ease at which you can
redirect input and output within a shell script, many sysadmins
store data in temporary files for processing purposes. In some
situations scripts become essential to the day-to-day operations of
a system and as such, may end up running on a regular basis via
crontab – never to be looked at again.“Unfortunately, some sysadmins who write scripts might store
sensitive data in temporary files, don’t restrict access to
temporary files, and might forget to remove them from the system
when they are no longer needed. In many cases, they use them when
it isn’t even necessary. The beauty of Linux and UNIX is that there
are hundreds of ways to accomplish the same task. I will keep my
Bash examples simple so you can focus on grasping the general
concepts.”