Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide

Programming with Shell Scripts

For our final topic in this book, we’ll show you how to combine multiple commands to perform more complex operations. Earlier when we covered the shell (bash), we said it had a programming language built in. In fact, you can write programs, or shell scripts, to accomplish tasks that a single command cannot. Like any good programming language, the shell has variables, conditionals (if-then-else), loops, input and output, and more. Entire books have been written on shell scripting, so we’ll be covering the bare minimum to get you started. For full documentation, run info bash, search the Web, or pick up a more in-depth O’Reilly book.