Bibliography

To unfold the full power of shell scripting, you need at least a passing familiarity with sed and awk. This is the standard tutorial. It includes an excellent introduction to "regular expressions". Read this book.

*

This excellent sys admin manual has a decent introduction to shell scripting for sys administrators and does a nice job of explaining the startup and initialization scripts. The book is long overdue for a third edition (are you listening, Tim O'Reilly?).

*

The standard reference, though a bit dated by now.

*

Good in-depth coverage of various programming languages available for Linux, including a fairly strong chapter on shell scripting.

*

Excellent coverage of algorithms and general programming practices.

*

Good info on shell scripting, with examples, and a short intro to Tcl and Perl.

*

This is a valiant effort at a decent shell primer, but somewhat deficient in coverage on programming topics and lacking sufficient examples.

*

A very handy pocket reference, despite lacking coverage of Bash-specific features.

*

Contains a couple of sections of very informative in-depth articles on shell programming, but falls short of being a tutorial. It reproduces much of the regular expressions tutorial from the Dougherty and Robbins book, above.

*

Excellent Bash pocket reference (don't leave home without it). A bargain at $4.95, but also available for free download on-line in pdf format.

*

The absolute best awk tutorial and reference. The free electronic version of this book is part of the awk documentation, and printed copies of the latest version are available from O'Reilly and Associates.

This book has served as an inspiration for the author of this document.

*

This well-written book contains some excellent pointers on shell scripting.

*

Very detailed and readable introduction to Linux system administration.

The book is available in print, or on-line.

*

The all-around best Linux command reference, even has a Bash section.

*

An array of six UNIX books on CD ROM, including UNIX Power Tools, Sed and Awk, and Learning the Korn Shell. A complete set of all the UNIX references and tutorials you would ever need at about $70. Buy this one, even if it means going into debt and not paying the rent.

Unfortunately, out of print at present.

*

The O'Reilly books on Perl. (Actually, any O'Reilly books.)

---

Ben Okopnik's well-written introductory Bash scripting articles in issues 53, 54, 55, 57, and 59 of the Linux Gazette , and his explanation of "The Deep, Dark Secrets of Bash" in issue 56.

Chet Ramey's bash - The GNU Shell, a two-part series published in issues 3 and 4 of the Linux Journal, July-August 1994.

Mike G's Bash-Programming-Intro HOWTO.

Richard's UNIX Scripting Universe.

Chet Ramey's Bash F.A.Q.

Example shell scripts at Lucc's Shell Scripts .

Example shell scripts at SHELLdorado .

Example shell scripts at Noah Friedman's script site.

Example shell scripts at SourceForge Snippet Library - shell scrips.

Giles Orr's Bash-Prompt HOWTO.

The sed F.A.Q.

Carlos Duarte's instructive "Do It With Sed" tutorial.

The GNU gawk reference manual (gawk is the extended GNU version of awk available on Linux and BSD systems).

Trent Fisher's groff tutorial.

Mark Komarinski's Printing-Usage HOWTO.

There is some nice material on I/O redirection in chapter 10 of the textutils documentation at the University of Alberta site.

has written the osimpa i386 assembler entirely as Bash scripts.

---

The excellent "Bash Reference Manual", by Chet Ramey and Brian Fox, distributed as part of the "bash-2-doc" package (available as an rpm). See especially the instructive example scripts in this package.

The comp.os.unix.shell newsgroup.

The manpages for bash and bash2, date, expect, expr, find, grep, gzip, ln, patch, tar, tr, bc, xargs. The texinfo documentation on bash, dd, m4, gawk, and sed.