Classic Shell Scripting

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 558 pages
• Published by: O'Reilly Media, Inc.
• Edition: 1st Edition edition May 1, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0596005954
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0596005955
• Book Dimensions: 9.1 x 7 x 1.2 inches
• Weighs: 1.7 pounds

Book Description
Shell scripting skills never go out of style. It's the shell that unlocks the real potential of Unix. Shell scripting is essential for Unix users and system administrators-a way to quickly harness and customize the full power of any Unix system. With shell scripts, you can combine the fundamental Unix text and file processing commands to crunch data and automate repetitive tasks. But beneath this simple promise lies a treacherous ocean of variations in Unix commands and standards. Classic Shell Scripting is written to help you reliably navigate these tricky waters. Writing shell scripts requires more than just a knowledge of the shell language, it also requires familiarity with the individual Unix programs: why each one is there, how to use them by themselves, and in combination with the other programs. The authors are intimately familiar with the tips and tricks that can be used to create great scripts, as well as the traps that can make your best effort a terrible shell script. With Classic Shell Scripting you'll avoid hours of wasted effort. You'll learn not only write useful shell scripts, but how to do it properly and portably. The ability to program and customize the shell quickly, reliably, and portably to get the best out of any individual system is an important skill for anyone operating and maintaining Unix or Linux systems. Classic Shell Scripting gives you everything you need to master these essential skills.

About The Author
Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native, is a professional programmer and technical author. He has worked with Unix systems since 1980, when he was introduced to a PDP-11 running a version of Sixth Edition Unix. He has been a heavy AWK user since 1987, when he became involved with gawk. Nelson Beebe is a long time Unix user and system administrator, and has helped for years on Usenet newsgroups.

Reader Reviews
This might be a great second book on shell scripting. Can serve as a valuable add on to "Learning Korn shell" from O'Reilly -- also a very strong book on shell scripting. The authors provide a lot of interesting and useful information that is difficult to find in other books. They devoted Ch 5 to piping and in 5.4 "Word List" they discuss famous Doug McIlroy alternative solution to Donald Knuth program of creating the list of the n most-frequent words, with counts of their frequency of occurrence, sorted by descending count from an arbitrary text file. The authors discuss many Unix tools that are used with shell (Unix toolbox). They provide a very good (but too brief) discussion of grep and find. Discussion of xargs (which is usually a sign on a good book on scripting) includes /dev/null trick, but unfortunately they do not mention an option -0n with which this trick makes the most sense. One of the best chapters of the book is Ch. 13 devoted to process control. Also good is Chapter 11 that provides a solution to pretty complex and practically important for many system administrators task of merging passwd files in Unix. It provides a perfect insight into solving real sysadmins problems using AWK and shell. Shortcomings are few. in "5.2. Structured Data for the Web" the authors should probably list AWK instead of SED. Also XML processing generally requires using a lexical analyzer, not regular expressions. Therefore a tag list example would be better converted to something simpler, for example generating C-tags for vi. Comment | | (Report this)