rock-the-party-2.md

CREATING THE ROCK-THE-PARTY TOOL

As you've worked in terminal you've typed a series of instructions, which you can make visible by entering the history command. If you do this you might see lines that look something like this:

501  ls
502  cd Development
503  ls
504  cd the-art-of-coding
505  ls
506  atom .
507  history

Here we changed directories to get into the ~/Development folder, and then into ~/Development/the-art-of-coding so that we could open it up in Atom. In this tutorial we're going to learn how to write a "script" that contains a series of lines just like this. You can really think of it as you would a script in a dramatic context--it's a series of lines that will get committed to memory, and that will get recalled/enacted in a very specific order. For instance, to get the behavior we see above, we would use the following lines:

#!/bin/bash

cd ~/Development/the-art-of-coding
atom .

That first line opens up the script by telling the computer which app to use as the interpreter. Were this a node.js script we'd enter #!/usr/bin/env node, but for shell scripts, we use #!/bin/bash.

But where do we put these lines? And how do we run them? Let's do a quick step-by-step runthrough of what we'd do to write a simple executable script.

Navigate to a folder you'd like to use to hold your scripts. You'll probably enter something like
```
 cd ~/Development
 mkdir scripts
 cd scripts
 atom .
```
Now--in Atom--create a new file and call it myscript.sh. Start off with that #!/bin/bash line and then add some commands it might be interesting to chain together.
```
 #!/bin/bash

 cd ~/Development
 echo "These are all of your development projects:"
 ls
 echo "done."
```
To actually RUN this script you'll need to find it in your Terminal and make it executable, which you can do by typing
```
 chmod 755 ~/Development/scripts/myscript.sh
```
And once you've done that, all you need to do is enter the full path to your script to run it:
```
 ~/Development/scripts/myscript.sh
```
(if you put your script somewhere else, you'll need to enter something different)
Now let's start the actual script you'