Beginning Portable Shell Scripting: From Novice to Professional

CHAPTER 10Shell Script Design

Many portability problems are made more approachable through good design. Good design makes it easier to isolate dependencies and reduces the chance that a portability issue with a tangentially related feature will prevent a script from performing its primary function. This chapter introduces some of the general principles of shell script design. There are other books that go into much more detail on shell script design and on program design in general. I focus primarily on issues applicable to shell scripts and, in particular, to portable shell scripts.

This chapter is full of guidelines, some of which are not always rules. The important thing is not to follow every guideline exactly in all cases; your goal should ...