Book Image

Bash Quick Start Guide

By : Ryder
Book Image

Bash Quick Start Guide

By: 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)

Keeping scripts brief and simple

The ideal shell script is a relatively short one, because shell script has such limited support for concepts such as variable scope, no support for a library or module system for robust packaging, a lot of global state of various kinds, and very limited data typing.

Instead of trying to write one very long program that does many things, follow the Unix tradition of writing shorter, smaller programs that do one thing each, and that do that thing very well.

If you find your Bash program is becoming too large and unwieldy, and you can't simplify it, consider translating it to Perl, Python, or a similar general-purpose program instead. This is quite normal; shell script has been used since its earliest days as a prototyping language, in exactly this way.