Chapter 15. Covering All Your Databases

Adatabase is simply a collection of information. The information is usually divided into records that may be simple or complex. There may be a handful of records, or a few dozen. Or there may be thousands or millions of records.

Each record in a database may be a single word, or it may comprise a number of fields. These fields may be self-contained data, or they may be keys to another database. A record may be one or more lines in a file, or an entire file by itself.

The /etc/passwd file on a Unix system is a database containing one record for each user. Each record contains seven fields, separated by colons. A typical entry for root is

root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/sh

The word-finder and anagram scripts in Chapter ...

Get Shell Scripting Recipes: A Problem-Solution Approach now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.