Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook - Third Edition

Introduction

In the beginning, computers read a program from cards or tape and generated a single report. There was no operating system, no graphics monitors, not even an interactive prompt.

By the 1960s, computers supported interactive terminals (frequently a teletype or glorified typewriter) to invoke commands.

When Bell Labs created an interactive user interface for the brand new Unix operating system, it had a unique feature. It could read and evaluate the same commands from a text file (called a shell script), as it accepted being typed on a terminal.

This facility was a huge leap forward in productivity. Instead of typing several commands to perform a set of operations, programmers could save the commands in a file and run them later ...