Nuts and Bolts of Shell Scripting

This book tackles the concept of writing UNIX scripts not by telling you how to
write 'canned scripts,' but rather explains the various commands you will use to
create shell scripts. The book does this by extensively explaining various commands (like echo, tr, ls, grep, sort, etc), providing manpage-like descriptions of the command and its options and even code snippets. I found this to be quite helpful in understanding them.

My favorite chapters were the ones devoted to Text Processing and Working with Files. I've worked with UNIX a lot over the past fifteen years or so and have lost count of the times I had to move or delete files or directories. I knew there had to be a way to automate some of this, but I never got around to learning about them until now.

This is a great book to have not just to learn more about shell scripting, but also to understand the numerous UNIX commands that go into creating scripts.

Other Reviews

• Nuts and Bolts of Shell Scripting
• Excellent book to learn the basics
• A good intro on Unix shell scripting and the problems it solves
• Nice overview of Bourne/sh scripting