Sams Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours

SRIRANGA VEERARAGHAVAN is a material scientist by training and a software engineer by trade. He has several years of software development experience in C, Java, Perl, and Bourne Shell and has contributed to several books, including Solaris 8: Complete Reference, UNIX Unleashed and Special Edition Using UNIX. Sriranga graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1997 and is presently pursuing further studies. He is currently employed in the Server Appliance group at Sun Microsystems, Inc. Before joining Sun, Sriranga was employed at Cisco Systems, Inc. Among other interests, Sriranga enjoys mountain biking, classical music, and playing Marathon with his brother Srivathsa. Sriranga can be reached via e-mail at ranga@soda.berkeley.edu.

(NOTE: Each chapter concludes with a Summary, Questions, and Terms.)

Introduction.
I. Introduction to UNIXand Shell Tools.

Hour 1. Shell Basics.


What Is a Command? What Is the Shell?

Hour 2. Script Basics.


The UNIX System. Shell Modes and Initialization. Getting Help.

Hour 3. Working with Files.


Listing Files. File Contents. Manipulating Files.

Hour 4. Working with Directories.


The Directory Tree. Switching Directories. Listing Files and Directories. Manipulating Directories.

Hour 5. Input and Output.


Output. Input. File Descriptors.

Hour 6. Manipulating File Attributes.


File Types. Owners, Groups, and Permissions.

Hour 7. Processes.


Starting a Process. Listing and Terminating Processes. Parent and Child Processes.

II. Shell Programming.

Hour 8. Variables.


Working with Variables. Environment and Shell Variables.

Hour 9. Substitution.


Filename Substitution (Globbing). Variable Substitution. Command and Arithmetic Substitution.

Hour 10. Quoting.


Quoting with Backslashes. Using Single Quotes. Using Double Quotes. Quoting Rules and Situations.

Hour 11. Flow Control.


The if Statement. The case Statement.

Hour 12. Loops.


The while Loop. The for and select Loops. Loop Control.

Hour 13. Parameters.


Special Variables. Options and Arguments. Option Parsing in Shell Scripts.

Hour 14. Functions.


Using Functions. Understanding Scope, Recursion, Return Codes, and Data Sharing.

Hour 15. Text Filters.


The head and tail Commands. Using grep. Counting Words.

Hour 16. Filtering Text with Regular Expressions.


The Basics of awk and sed. Using sed.

Hour 17. Filtering Text with awk.


What Is awk? Using awk Features.

Hour 18. Other Tools.


The Built-In Commands. The sleep Command. The find Command. xargs. The expr Command. The bc Command.

III. Advanced Topics.

Hour 19. Signals.