Shell Scripting: Expert Recipes for Linux, Bash, and More

Summary

There are many operating systems, shells, and editors to choose from. In general, the choice of editor is a personal preference. The choice of operating system can be very significant in some ways, although for shell scripting purposes, many environments (all of the GNU/Linux distributions, Cygwin, and some proprietary Unixes, notably Solaris) today use GNU bash and the GNU implementations of standard Unix tools such as bc, grep, ls, diff, and so on. This book focuses on GNU/Linux, bash, and the GNU tools, but the vast majority also applies to their non-GNU equivalents.

I hope some of the customizations in the second part of the chapter will prove useful as you tweak the environment to customize the system to your personal preferences; the computer is there to make your life easier, and not the other way around, so if an alias means that you don’t have to remember some complicated syntax, your mind is freed of distractions and you can concentrate on what you are actually trying to achieve, not on memorizing the exact syntax of some obscure command.

These first two introductory chapters should have prepared you to do some shell scripting; the rest of Part I covers the tools available and how to use them. The rest of the book builds on this introductory material with real-world recipes that you can use and build on, and so that you can be inspired to write your own scripts to perform real-world tasks to address situations that you face.