Bourne / Bash shell scripting tutorial

By Steve Parker

A Bourne Shell Programming/Scripting Tutorial for learning about using the Unix shell. Learn Linux / Unix shell scripting by example along with the theory. We'll have you mastering Unix shell scripting in no time!

This tutorial is written to help people understand some of the basics of shell script programming, and hopefully to introduce some of the possibilities of simple but powerful programming available under the bourne shell. As such, it has been written as a basis for one-on-one or group tutorials and exercises, and as a reference for subsequent use.

Steve Bourne, wrote the Bourne shell which appeared in the Seventh Edition Bell Labs Research version of Unix. Many other shells have been written; this particular tutorial concentrates on the Bourne and the Bourne Again shells. Other shells include the Korn Shell (ksh), the C Shell (csh), and variations such as tcsh. This tutorial does not cover those shells. Maybe a future version will cover ksh; I do not intend to write a tutorial for csh, as csh programming is considered harmful.

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GNU Bash Reference Manual

Chet Ramey, Case Western Reserve University
Brian Fox, Free Software Foundation
Edited for publication by Brian Gough

Bash is the shell, or command language interpreter, for the GNU operating system. The name is an acronym for the ‘Bourne-Again SHell’, a pun on Stephen Bourne, the author of the direct ancestor of the current Unix shell sh, which appeared in the Seventh Edition Bell Labs Research version of Unix.

Bash is largely compatible with sh and incorporates useful features from the Korn shell ksh and the C shell csh. It is intended to be a conformant implementation of the IEEE POSIX Shell and Tools portion of the IEEE POSIX specification (IEEE Standard 1003.1). It offers functional improvements over sh for both interactive and programming use.

While the GNU operating system provides other shells, including a version of csh, Bash is the default shell. Like other GNU software, Bash is quite portable. It currently runs on nearly every version of Unix and a few other operating systems--independently-supported ports exist for MS-DOS, OS/2, and Windows platforms.

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Bash Guide for Beginners

By Machtelt Garrels

The primary reason for writing this document is that a lot of readers feel the existing HOWTO to be too short and incomplete, while the Bash Scripting guide is too much of a reference work. There is nothing in between these two extremes. I also wrote this guide on the general principal that not enough free basic courses are available, though they should be.

This is a practical guide which, while not always being too serious, tries to give real-life instead of theoretical examples. I partly wrote it because I don't get excited with stripped down and over-simplified examples written by people who know what they are talking about, showing some really cool Bash feature so much out of its context that you cannot ever use it in practical circumstances. You can read that sort of stuff after finishing this book, which contains exercises and examples that will help you survive in the real world.

From my experience as UNIX/Linux user, system administrator and trainer, I know that people can have years of daily interaction with their systems, without having the slightest knowledge of task automation. Thus they often think that UNIX is not userfriendly, and even worse, they get the impression that it is slow and old-fashioned. This problem is another one that can be remedied by this guide.

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Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide: An in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting

By Mendel Cooper

This tutorial assumes no previous knowledge of scripting or programming, but progresses rapidly toward an intermediate/advanced level of instruction . . . all the while sneaking in little nuggets of UNIX wisdom and lore. It serves as a textbook, a manual for self-study, and a reference and source of knowledge on shell scripting techniques. The exercises and heavily-commented examples invite active reader participation, under the premise that the only way to really learn scripting is to write scripts.

This book is suitable for classroom use as a general introduction to programming concepts.

The shell is a command interpreter. More than just the insulating layer between the operating system kernel and the user, it's also a fairly powerful programming language. A shell program, called a script, is an easy-to-use tool for building applications by "gluing together" system calls, tools, utilities, and compiled binaries. Virtually the entire repertoire of UNIX commands, utilities, and tools is available for invocation by a shell script. If that were not enough, internal shell commands, such as testing and loop constructs, lend additional power and flexibility to scripts. Shell scripts are especially well suited for administrative system tasks and other routine repetitive tasks not requiring the bells and whistles of a full-blown tightly structured programming language.

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