bash Cookbook

About This Book

This book covers bash, the GNU Bourne Again Shell, which is a member of the Bourne family of shells that includes the original Bourne shell sh, the Korn shell ksh, and the Public Domain Korn Shell pdksh. While these and other shells such as dash, and zsh are not specifically covered, odds are that most of the scripts will work pretty well with them.

You should be able to read this book cover to cover, and also just pick it up and read anything that catches your eye. But perhaps most importantly, we hope that when you have a question about how to do something or you need a hint, you will be able to easily find the right answer—or something close enough—and save time and effort.

A great part of the Unix philosophy is to build simple tools that do one thing well, then combine them as needed. This combination of tools is often accomplished via a shell script because these commands, called pipelines, can be long or difficult to remember and type. Where appropriate, we’ll cover the use of many of these tools in the context of the shell script as the glue that holds the pieces together to achieve the goal.

This book was written using OpenOffice.org Writer running on whatever Linux or Windows machine happened to be handy, and kept in Subversion (see Appendix D). The nature of the Open Document Format facilitated many critical aspects of writing this book, including cross-references and extracting code (see Processing Files with No Line Breaks).

GNU Software

bash, and many of ...