Mac OS® X Tiger™ Unleashed

Automating Tasks with Shell Scripts

With as many times as we've mentioned how powerful shell scripting can be and how much time and effort it can save you, you might be expecting that writing shell scripts is going to require dealing with some additional level of complexity on top of what you've already learned. Shell scripts are simple programs that you write in the language of the shell, and if you've made it this far in the book, you've been learning and working in the language of the shell for a few chapters now. If you consider this fact, and the notion that Unix, by design, attempts to abstract the notion of input and output so that everything looks the same to the operating system, you might have a good guess at what we'll say next: That's ...