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

Even if you feel that you already know the basic structure of a Bash command well, carefully looking at the structure of a typical command line and knowing the rules of string quoting can make it much clearer what's wrong when something doesn't behave as expected. We use single quotes to keep characters literal, and double quotes to safely perform expansion for variables and substitutions. Developing disciplined habits with quoting and understanding how Bash runs commands in sequence is helpful not just for scripting, but for interactive command line work as well.

Having learned the structure of a Bash command line, in the next chapter we'll apply it to learning some essential commands that will form the basis of many shell scripts.