[Nottingham] Shell programming

[Roger Light]

Hi,

A slew of good replies, so in no particular order...

Duncan wrote:

> O'Reilly's Linux in a nutsell covers a little bit of everything:
> common command line tools, bash, t?csh, sed , gawk
> 
> it is a pretty reasonable reference but utterly useless if you want 
> example scripts.

I'll have a look. The target audience (which I failed to mention before), it largely non-unix people, although they do use Solaris/Linux, so example scripts would be useful I think.


Mike wrote: 

> Look for some books by Mike Joy (he used to be my university 
> lecturer so I know his stuff is good). He has done several books on 
> unix and Linux and some of them, IIRC, were the kind of thing you 
> are looking for.

Fantastic. I'll give it a look.

Rob wrote:

> I just rediscovered "seq" which has saved me no end of time.

Aargh! I keep being reminded of seq, reading the man page and thinking how useful it would be, but then completely forgetting about it when I actually need it :)

> Best bet is to have a look through the output of "help" (in bash) and
> "ls /bin" and make sure you have some idea what everything does.

That's a good suggestion, but unfortunately for the guys in the lab it's all tcsh here (of course, they can just run bash anyway).

> Then pick something random out of "/usr/bin" everyday and see 
> what it can do.

If only time wasn't as much a luxury as it is.

> Better still would be to have a look at http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ 
> which is the 'Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide'.  It breaks down lots 
> of the more interesting commands and gives examples as well.  It's 
> a comprehensive guide that, at the moment, would result in 585 
> printed pages of output if you were to print the PDF at 
> http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/abs-guide.pdf.

Wow, that is quite impressive. I've not come across that before (I use more tcsh than bash because of work), but it's definitely going on my reading list.

Another Mike wrote:

> man

Thanks, I'd not come across that one before.

Cheers,

Roger

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