CHAPTER 1

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The POSIX Shell and Command-Line Utilities

The POSIX shell is a descendant of the KornShell, which is a descendant of the Bourne shell. The basic syntax has remained the same, and Bourne shell scripts will usually run successfully in a POSIX shell. Not all of the KornShell features are included in POSIX (there are no arrays, for example), but the most important ones are. Those, which would be important to many developers, are string manipulation and arithmetic.

The scripts in this book make extensive use of features of the POSIX shell, and keep external commands to a minimum. This chapter presents an overview of the features of the ...

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