Classic Shell Scripting

Foreword

Surely I haven't been doing shell scripting for 30 years?!? Well, now that I think about it, I suppose I have, although it was only in a small way at first. (The early Unix shells, before the Bourne shell, were very primitive by modern standards, and writing substantial scripts was difficult. Fortunately, things quickly got better.)

In recent years, the shell has been neglected and underappreciated as a scripting language. But even though it was Unix's first scripting language, it's still one of the best. Its combination of extensibility and efficiency remains unique, and the improvements made to it over the years have kept it highly competitive with other scripting languages that have gotten a lot more hype. GUIs are more fashionable than command-line shells as user interfaces these days, but scripting languages often provide most of the underpinnings for the fancy screen graphics, and the shell continues to excel in that role.

The shell's dependence on other programs to do most of the work is arguably a defect, but also inarguably a strength: you get the concise notation of a scripting language plus the speed and efficiency of programs written in C (etc.). Using a common, general-purpose data representation—lines of text—in a large (and extensible) set of tools lets the scripting language plug the tools together in endless combinations. The result is far more flexibility and power than any monolithic software package with a built-in menu item for (supposedly) everything ...