Classic Shell Scripting

Chapter Summary

We recommend reading the book in order, as each chapter builds upon the concepts and material covered in the chapters preceding it. Here is a chapter-by-chapter summary:

Chapter 1

Here we provide a brief history of Unix. In particular, the computing environment at Bell Labs where Unix was developed motivated much of the Software Tools philosophy. This chapter also presents the principles for good Software Tools that are then expanded upon throughout the rest of the book.

Chapter 2

This chapter starts off the discussion. It begins by describing compiled languages and scripting languages, and the tradeoffs between them. Then it moves on, covering the very basics of shell scripting with two simple but useful shell scripts. The coverage includes commands, options, arguments, shell variables, output with echo and printf, basic I/O redirection, command searching, accessing arguments from within a script, and execution tracing. It closes with a look at internationalization and localization; issues that are increasingly important in today's "global village."

Chapter 3

Here we introduce text searching (or "matching") with regular expressions. We also cover making changes and extracting text. These are fundamental operations that form the basis of much shell scripting.

Chapter 4

In this chapter we describe a number of the text processing software tools that are used over and over again when shell scripting. Two of the most important tools presented here are sort and uniq, which serve ...