A working knowledge of shell scripting is essential to everyone wishing to become reasonably adept at system administration, even if they do not anticipate ever having to actually write a script. Consider that as a Linux machine boots up, it executes the shell scripts in /etc/ to restore the system configuration and set up services. A detailed understanding of these startup scripts is important for analyzing the behavior of a system, and possibly modifying it. Writing shell scripts is not hard to learn, since the scripts can be built in bite−sized sections and there is only a fairly small set of shell−specific operators and options [1]. | Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide An in-depth exploration of the gentle art of shell scripting Mendel Cooper Brindle-Phlogiston Associates thegrendel@ 29 September 2002 14 June 2000 30 October 2000 Revised by mc Revised by mc Revision History Revision Initial release. Revision Bugs fixed plus much additional material and more example scripts. Revision 12 February 2001 Revised by mc Another major update. Revision 08 July 2001 Revised by mc More bugfixes much more material more scripts - a complete revision and expansion of the book. Revision 03 September 2001 Revised by mc Major update. Bugfixes material added chapters and sections reorganized. Revision 14 October 2001 Bugfixes reorganization material added. Stable release. Revision 06 January 2002 Bugfixes material and scripts added. Revision 31 March 2002 Bugfixes material and scripts added. Revision 02 June 2002 TANGERINE release A few bugfixes much more material and scripts added. Revision 16 June 2002 Revised by mc MANGO release Quite a number of typos fixed more material and scripts added. Revision 13 July 2002 Revised by mc PAPAYA release A few bugfixes much more material and scripts added. Revision 29 September 2002 Revised by mc POMEGRANATE release some bugfixes more material one more script added. Revised by mc Revised by mc Revised by mc Revised by mc 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 snippets 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. The latest update of this document as an archived bzip2-ed tarball including both the SGML source and rendered .
