Book Image

Bash Quick Start Guide

By : Tom Ryder
Book Image

Bash Quick Start Guide

By: Tom Ryder

Overview of this book

Bash and shell script programming is central to using Linux, but it has many peculiar properties that are hard to understand and unfamiliar to many programmers, with a lot of misleading and even risky information online. Bash Quick Start Guide tackles these problems head on, and shows you the best practices of shell script programming. This book teaches effective shell script programming with Bash, and is ideal for people who may have used its command line but never really learned it in depth. This book will show you how even simple programming constructs in the shell can speed up and automate any kind of daily command-line work. For people who need to use the command line regularly in their daily work, this book provides practical advice for using the command-line shell beyond merely typing or copy-pasting commands into the shell. Readers will learn techniques suitable for automating processes and controlling processes, on both servers and workstations, whether for single command lines or long and complex scripts. The book even includes information on configuring your own shell environment to suit your workflow, and provides a running start for interpreting Bash scripts written by others.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Summary

Because a typical shell script calls so many different commands, knowing the commands provided to you by the Bash shell itself, and by the system on which it runs, equips you to choose the right tool for the job; that decision can be particularly difficult in shell scripting, with so many options and alternatives available.

Knowing what the Bash shell provides and what the POSIX standard specifies for the system to provide will help you write shell scripts that will run safely, reliably, and portably on the systems where you need them to run. Tools like type, help, and man will enable you to identify and find the correct documentation for these commands.

In the next chapter, we'll look at how we can specify and redirect input and output for these and other commands, allowing you to pass just the data you need to them, just when you need it.

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