UNIX® User’s Handbook, Second Edition

Chapter 12. Introduction to Shell Programming

Shell Programming

There is much more to a shell than meets the eye. The shell can do much more than the command-line interpreter everyone is used to using. UNIX shells actually provide a powerful interpretive programming language as well.

In this chapter, we’ll cover ksh shell programming. I chose ksh because most ksh programming techniques work with the Bourne shell as well. There is a follow-on to ksh programming at the end of the chapter for csh because the csh employs some different programming techniques from the ksh.

We’ll cover the most important ksh programming techniques. The climax of this chapter is a fairly sophisticated shell program to remove files and place them in a directory, rather than ...