Why scripts often process text in Bash Scripting - See It in Action

Why Scripts Often Process Text

📖 Scenario: You work as a system helper who needs to check and organize information stored in text files on a computer. Many system details and logs are saved as text, so scripts help to read and manage this text quickly.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple Bash script that reads a list of usernames and their login counts, then filters and shows only those users who logged in more than a certain number of times.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a text data variable with usernames and login counts

Add a threshold variable to filter users by login count

Use a loop to process each line of the text data

Print only users with login counts above the threshold

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

System administrators often write scripts to read and analyze text logs or user data to monitor system usage or detect issues.

💼 Career

Knowing how to process text in scripts is essential for automating tasks, managing servers, and handling data in many IT and DevOps roles.

1

Create the user login data

Create a Bash variable called user_data that contains these exact lines of text, each with a username and login count separated by a space:
alice 5
bob 3
carol 8
dave 2

Bash Scripting

# Create the user_data variable with the exact lines
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use double quotes and \n to separate lines inside the variable.

2

Set the login count threshold

Create a variable called threshold and set it to 4 to filter users who logged in more than 4 times.

Bash Scripting

user_data="alice 5\nbob 3\ncarol 8\ndave 2"
# Set the threshold variable to 4
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 4 to the variable threshold.

3

Filter users by login count

Use a while loop with read to process each line of user_data. Inside the loop, split each line into user and count. Then use an if statement to check if count is greater than threshold. If yes, print the user and count separated by a space.

Bash Scripting

user_data="alice 5\nbob 3\ncarol 8\ndave 2"
threshold=4
# Use a while read loop to process user_data
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use done <<< "$user_data" to feed the variable lines into the loop.

4

Print the filtered users

Run the script so it prints only the users with login counts greater than the threshold. The output should show each qualifying user and their count on a separate line.

Bash Scripting

user_data="alice 5\nbob 3\ncarol 8\ndave 2"
threshold=4
while read user count; do
    if (( count > threshold )); then
        echo "$user $count"
    fi
done <<< "$user_data"
# Run the script to print the filtered users
# Your code here

Need a hint?

The script should print only users with counts above 4.