Learning Linux Shell Scripting

Chapter 6. Neat Tricks with Shell Scripting

In the last chapter, you learned about shell and environment variables. You also learned about how to export environment variables, read-only variables, command-line arguments, and create/handle arrays.

In this chapter, we will cover following topics:

• Interactive Shell scripts and reading from the keyboard
• Using the here operator (<<) and here string (<<<)
• File handling
• Enabling debugging
• Syntax checking
• Shell tracing

Interactive Shell scripts – reading user input

The read command is a shell built-in command for reading data from a file or keyboard.

The read command receives the input from the keyboard or a file until it receives a newline character. Then, it converts the newline character into a null character: ...