[olug] Newbie Bash Scripting Tutorial

[Rob Townley]

On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 7:18 AM, Amy Mason <amason80 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thanks everyone, and to those who recommended .. Google it.. believe me,
> that's where I started.. I tended to find things that were far above my
> head, and made the lecture notes look... um, comprehensive and useful. I
> will try to pick up the book though, that sounds like a good direction to
> go.  The more I look at the problem, the more I see that its a problem with
> filters more than scripting anyhow, so I'm going to go google those for a
> while, but this will be useful in other ways.. hooray for breaking
> computers... *evil grin*

I depended on google too much for information that i had totally
forgot was built into *nix systems and wasted time, so a friendly
reminder of all the reference material built-in at the command line.

google.com can be a distraction from the command line.
google desktop configured to index /usr/share/ or / may be more
helpful, but your still not at a bash prompt.  Limiting to PostScript
files may narrow down your search well.   Wish the drop down list had
text files and man, however.

We often forget the info built into the OS and accessible from the
command line.  Tutorials are fine but when hacking at a problem, quick
access to some essentials can be more useful.

info coreutils
info bash

man bash  (not a tutorial and hard to find where a "for" loop is
documented, but it is there...)
man for  and man while  (these work now on my system Fedora Core 11,
but it didn't in the past.  did i yum install some bash reference?)

/usr/share/
/usr/share/doc/


>
> Amy
>
> On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 12:07 AM, Edward Pluta <epluta3 at cox.net> wrote:
>
>> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Christopher Cashell" <topher-olug at zyp.org>
>> To: "Omaha Linux User Group" <olug at olug.org>
>> Sent: Tuesday, September 15, 2009 11:54 PM
>> Subject: Re: [olug] Newbie Bash Scripting Tutorial
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Sep 15, 2009 at 8:43 PM, Amy Mason <amason80 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I've been lurking around here for several months, since I used to come to
>> > meetings before moving to Lincoln, but I was wondering if anyone has a
>> > good
>> > idea where I can find a decent tutorial for bash scripting, as well as a
>> > tutorial for filters on the command line. (Things like "sort" "comm"
>> "tr",
>> > piping and redirection, etc... I'm in a Linux class now, and honestly not
>> > getting as much out of my professor's lectures as I would hope, and
>> really
>> > could use the help.
>>
>> There's been a couple of good URLs posted, including one from The
>> Linux Documentation Project, and The Advanced Bash Scripting guide
>> (ABS).  Both of those are well worth reading.
>>
>> However, I think what helped me the most wasn't the bash specific
>> stuff or the scripting logic, so much as the O'Reilly book "Linux in a
>> Nutshell".  The first part of the book covers general Linux command
>> line usage, but the meat of the book is a fairly comprehensive
>> reference of command line commands, along with good descriptions,
>> examples, etc.  I'd suggest picking up a copy of that book and, as
>> boring as it sounds, read the entire command reference.  You don't
>> need to memorize it or study it, but at least skim through every
>> single command in the reference and take a look at it's description.
>>
>> Then, when you are writing a shell script and you need to do foo, you
>> might remember that a command already exists to do foo, and you might
>> even recall the name of the command.  Often in shell scripting, the
>> key really is just knowing that a command already exists that'll do
>> most of the work for you.
>>
>> Don't skip the chapters in awk and sed, either.  They may not be as
>> fashionable as Perl and company, but I can't count how many times I've
>> pulled them out to accomplish something faster and easier than anyone
>> thought possible.
>>
>> > Amy
>>
>> --
>> Christopher
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>> I do AIX programming for a living, and everyone on my team owns the "Unix
>> in
>> a nutshell" book. It's awesome and can be had from amazon or half.com for
>> about $10. I assume the linux version is very similar as most commands and
>> concepts are as well.
>>
>> ~ed
>>
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