bash Cookbook: Solutions and Examples for bash Users (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

I had one of those questions today about whether an option exists for a particular built-in command, 'type', and was about to painstakingly page through the bash man page as usual, when I remembered I had just gotten this book. Looked up 'type' in the index, and it referred me to two different pages: one that told me how I can avoid paging through the man page (use the 'help' command!), and one telling me everything I needed to know about using the command (and others like it) in my desired context. I was so happy I kissed it. Yes, I kissed the book. From a quick thumb-through, I gathered that the rest of the book was just as concise and easy to navigate. Probably not great for complete linux n00bs, but it sure beats the bash man page!!! For anyone who uses the bash shell on a regular basis, whether for scripting or just running unix commands, this is absolutely indispensable. I have no idea how I got through 13+ years of unix programming without it.

Currently this is the only book that specifically covers bash 3.2, the version that contain new and interesting features like =~ operator for "normal" regular expression matching. The main advantage of the book that it really covers a lot of ground and provides system administrators and users with a lot of good and difficult to find tips about customizing of the environment and making yourself more productive. Chapters 5-6 which provide good overview of new features introduced in version 3.x including "normal" regular expressions pattern matching ( operator =~) and C-style for loop. One problem with shells traditionally use two completely obsolete notations for regular expressions (basic regular expression often known as DOS-style regular expressions plus quite perverse prefix notation ). Bash 3.2 did not fixes this problem as this is a problem of Unix in general (Unix can be called an Os that uses a dozen of different definitions of regular expressions :-) that but at least added a normal regular expression notion to the list. After chapters 5 and 6 I recommend reading chapters 9, 17 and 19 and then the rest. While chapters are of very uneven quality, usually you can find at least one useful tip in each. The spectrum of bash related tips and useful mini-scripts is quote substantial. The authors cover classic things like customizing prompt quite well. The book is not only about bash it covers a lot of ground including use of classic Unix utilities in scripting (most notably grep, find, sort, and date) along with related topics such as use of pipes and I/O redirection. Of course for such a complex topic there are some shortcomings. It's a pretty difficult task to write a good cookbook but authors did an excellent job and provided many very valuable tips that can help to improve both system administrators and power users productivity. One of the problems for a cookbook is a good organization and specifically a good starting chapter and here authors failed. Some chapters are half-baked. The Chapter about version control is badly written and very superficial. The authors just mention a couple of system without any details. And in this topic the devil is in details. Some bash features are explained superficially. For example bash has horrible implementation of pushd/popd/dirs troika and it not that easy to use them productively. One notable deficiency is that there is no way to suppress duplicates which in essence make this feature almost unusable. The authors treatment looks like a baseless advertizing of a poorly implemented feature. But I hope that the authors will improve the book in the next edition and I am reluctant to downgrade the book based on those flaws. After all, this is a cookbook and it should be judged by the best recipes not the worst.

Linux system admin is something I do as part of my job. I've been able to acquire the basics and get the job done, but I knew that there were better ways to get the job done. Nothing like having an expert to help learn the ins and outs. This book allowed me to take it to the next level. There are many excellent examples on how to get it done, as well as advice on things that should not be done. There is a good mix of newbie info as well as useful tips for the seasoned veteran. There's usually more than one way to get the job done, and this book showed me some new, better ways to accomplish the task at hand. If you're working with bash, you'll find something useful in this book.

This book covers the GNU Bourne Again Shell, which is a member of the Bourne family of shells that includes the original Bourne shell sh, the Korn shell ksh, and the Public Domain Korn Shell pdksh. This book is for anyone who uses a Unix or Linux system, as well as system administrators who may use several systems on any given day. Thus, there are solutions and useful sections for all levels of users including newcomers. This book is full of recipes for creating scripts and interacting with the shell that will allow you to greatly increase your productivity. Chapter 1, "Beginning bash" covers what a shell is, why you should care about it, and then the basics of bash including how you get it on your system. The next five chapters are on the basics that you would need when working with any shell - standard I/O, command execution, shell variables, and shell logic and arithmetic. Next there are two chapters on "Intermediate Shell Tools". These chapters' recipes use some utilities that are not part of the shell, but which are so useful that it is hard to imagine using the shell without them, such as "sort" and "grep", for example. Chapter nine features recipes that allow you to find files by case, date, type, size, etc. Chapter 10, "Additional Features for Scripting" has much to do with code reuse, which is something you find even in scripting. Chapter 11, "Working with Dates and Times", seems like it would be very simple, but it's not. This chapter helps you get through the complexities of dealing with different formats for displaying the time and date and converting between various date formats. Chapter 12, "End-User Tasks As Shell Scripts", shows you a few larger though not large examples of scripts. They are meant to give you useful, real world examples of actual uses of shell scripts beyond just system administration tasks. Chapter 13, "Parsing and Similar Tasks", is about tasks that will be familiar to programmers. It's not necessarily full of more advanced scripts than the other recipes in the book, but if you are not a programmer, these tasks might seem obscure or irrelevant to your use of bash. Topics covered include parsing HTML, setting up a database with MySQL, and both trimming and compressing whitespace. Chapter 14 is on dealing with the security of your shell scripts. Chapters 15 through 19 finish up the book starting with a chapter on advanced scripting that focuses on script portability. Chapter 16 is related to the previous chapter on portability and is concerned with configuring and customizing your bash environment. Chapter 17 is about miscellaneous items that didn't fit well into any other chapter. The subjects include capturing file metadata for recovery, sharing and logging sessions, and unzipping many ZIP files at once. Chapter 18 deals with shortcuts aimed at the limiting factor of many uses of bash - the typing speed of the user and shortcuts that cut down on the amount of typing necessary. The final chapter in the book, "