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Re: shell scripting book
- To: "Nadav Har'El" <nyh(at-nospam)math.technion.ac.il>
- Subject: Re: shell scripting book
- From: Adi Stav <stav(at-nospam)actcom.co.il>
- Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 07:12:29 +0300
- Cc: Hetz Ben Hamo <hetz-home(at-nospam)cobol2java.com>, ILUG <linux-il(at-nospam)linux.org.il>
- Delivered-To: linux.org.il-linux-il@linux.org.il
- In-Reply-To: <20010726171958.B23108@leeor.math.technion.ac.il>; from nyh@math.technion.ac.il on Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 05:19:58PM +0300
- Mail-Followup-To: Nadav Har'El <nyh@math.technion.ac.il>,Hetz Ben Hamo <hetz-home@cobol2java.com>,ILUG <linux-il@linux.org.il>
- References: <200107261413.RAA28613@mail.intercomp-sys.com> <20010726171958.B23108@leeor.math.technion.ac.il>
- Sender: Adi Stav <adi(at-nospam)stav.org.il>
- Sender: linux-il-bounce(at-nospam)cs.huji.ac.il
- User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i
On Thu, Jul 26, 2001 at 05:19:58PM +0300, Nadav Har'El wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 26, 2001, Hetz Ben Hamo wrote about "shell scripting book":
> > Hi,
> >
> > Few people have asked me about a good book to learn shell scripting...
> >
> > Any recommendations, people? are there online tutorials? back when I started
> > there was an oreilly book, but I lost it and can't remember it's name...
>
> It depends what you mean by "shell scripting". There are two possible ways
> to read this:
> 1. How to use a given shell (say, bash or zsh)
> or
> 2. How to use Unix utilities (like ls, grep, awk, sort, date, etc.) from
> within a shell.
>
> Kernighan & Pike's "The Unix Programming Environment" was an *excellent*
> book explaining both issues (as well as a lot of other advance stuff!), but
> it is quite outdated by now (it was published in 1984, but it still in print -
> I bought a copy last year). I don't know what book with comparable quality
> is recommended now.
>
> If you're like many Linux users out there - already familiar with the basic
> Unix commands (ls, date, grep, etc.) but want to learn how to write shell
> scripts ("WTF is that 'fi'? Why not 'endif'?"), or generally use your shell
> in a more efficient manner, then you need a book only on issue #1 above.
>
> In that case I recommend Zsh, and you can find documentation on it in
>
> http://sunsite.dk/zsh/
>
> (it's quite possible to learn zsh from these documentations - it includes a
> somewhat-old introduction, and more updated reference manuals)
To that I'd like to flamingly add that if you're already going to learn
shell scripting, learn portable shell. Plain bourne shell is quite
a powerful environment in itself, and I personally find that the cooler
a non-standard non-interactive shell feature seems to me, the less
portable it is. Not that there's anything wrong with interactive
features.
> Under no circumstances use csh or tcsh. Search google for "csh considered
> harmful" for an explanation on why (the article was written by Perl guru Tom
> Christiansen).
Ohhh yeah.
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