Re: shell scripts.
Quoting Jameson Burt (jameson@mnsinc.com):
> > On Fri, Jan 15, 1999 at 11:37:23PM +1100, Shao Zhang wrote:
> > > Hi,
> > > Where can I learn how to write the shell scripts?? Is there any
> > > good documentation to read??
> > >
> > > Thx.
> > >
> > > Shao.
> > >
> >
> > I would recommend O'Reilly "Learning the bash Shell".
> > (http://www.ora.com) and "Beginning Linux Programming" by WROX Press
> > has one chapter on shell programming.
> >
> I found this O'Reilly book useful also.
>
> Just a warning: DO NOT PROGRAM in csh or tcsh.
> I enthusiastically did this for two years,
> only to find their limitations repeatedly
> I recently read a 15 page article confirming that one should program in
> sh, ksh, or bash.
> Of course, all of these are backward compatible with sh,
> so a book on sh would be sufficient.
> Personally, I would ignore ksh because it is commercial,
> so you won't find it or easily get it on every computer.
> The bash shell does have some nice extensions not found in the sh shell,
> for example, it can work with vectors and of course bash is superbly
> better than sh interactively.
>
> Here is an example horror in csh
> awk '\
> {/ras/ printf{"got it"}} \
> ' \
> file2
> Notice that I had to use a backslash at the end of every line,
> unlike a bash/sh shell script.
> There were some other nuicances I recently had with such a script that
> caused me to abandon even bothering helping someone using a csh:
> he wanted me to modify his .cshrc which I abandoned after 10 hours of
> attempts.
> For example a csh script like the above wants to do something odd at each
> carriage return and backslash; If I put all on one line, the script would
> work, but when I used backslashes for line continuation it failed to
> print.
> Then, a single line (not at all neat) was limited to something like
> 1000 characters.
>
> You can learn a good deal by reading "man bash", 75 pages.
> And also by reading others' sh/bash scripts:
> file /bin/* /usr/bin/* |grep shell
> gives you many good scripts to learn from (look at a few lines,
> not the whole script).
>
> --
> Jim Burt, NJ9L, Fairfax, Virginia, USA
> jameson@mnsinc.com http://www.mnsinc.com/jameson
> jameson@pressroom.com (703) 235-5213 ext. 132 (work)
call me crazy, but after messing around with shell programming for a while, i
discovered perl. i'm no major system programmer or admin or anything, but
why on earth would someone ever want to use some shell programming language
over perl? especially since perl can run on almost any platform, so when
whatever shell you are programming for fades away or when you switch from
one platform to another, your perl scripts will live on.
-James Pollard
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