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)

Who this book is for

This book is ideal for you if you have access to a computer with Bash installed or available, and you've maybe even used Bash or another Unix-like command shell before to enter at least a few basic commands, but you can't understand the official Bash manual page very well (or at all). You should not be ashamed of that; it's one of the most famously dense manual pages for software ever written! Some experience with basic programming structures such as variables, expressions, conditionals, and loops will help you understand the bookbut Bash mostly has its own way of doing things that you need to learn from the ground up, so you don't need to be an expert in any given language.

Alternatively, you may be a more experienced systems administrator, or even an expert in another programming language, who has done a fair bit more than a beginner with shell script, but is still frustrated by the dark corners and difficulties in using it, and wants a course in "remedial shell script" to unlearn some bad habits. The book will clarify arcane and difficult syntax and patterns in shell programming. You'll become much more confident in using it in your work when the situation calls for it, and you'll be in a position to fix both your own and others' shell scripts, and even to train others on writing shell script effectively.