Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours, Second Edition

Hour 21. Problem Solving with Functions

In previous chapters, you wrote short shell scripts that performed specific tasks. Many of these scripts performed common operations such as displaying error and warning messages and prompting the users for input. To easily repeat these tasks, you created reusable functions for your scripts.

In this chapter, you take this a step farther and create a library of functions that can be readily reused in shell scripts. A library is a repository of functions that can be accessed by shell scripts. The specific topics related to libraries that you will examine are

• Library basics

• Creating a library