Programming Question

The sort answer is that files can be made executable (i.e. the OS will load and execute the file) if the executable bit is set. You can do this for a given file by typing `chmod +x /path/to/my/file`.

If you are programming C/C++, the executable format will most likely be ELF which is a standard for object code layout (I think it stands for executable linking format or something).

A lot more fun is knowing how linux will execute text files. If you write a text file as follows (^D means press CTRL-D, $ is your command line prompt):

$ cat > myfile.sh
#!/bin/bash

echo "Hello world"
^D
$ chmod +x myfile.sh
$ ./myfile.sh
Hello world

Bash scripting is generally useful and is a sorely lacking feature in Windows. Indeed every Windows computer I have at work has all the unix tools installed on it.

I hope that helps!

Sohail

Then theres always python is you want to do something slightly more powerful than shell scripting without the complexity of a language such as C or C++.

Check out 'Dive Into Python' in the pre-installed Ubuntu docs to see more about it.