Bibliography

This compendium contains a couple of articles on shell script viruses.

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Covers much of the same material as the ABS Guide, though in a different style.

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Unfolding the full power of shell scripting requires at least a passing familiarity with sed and awk. This is the standard tutorial. It includes an excellent introduction to "regular expressions". Recommended.

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Still the best all-around reference on Regular Expressions.

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This excellent sys admin manual has a decent introduction to shell scripting for sys administrators and does a thorough job of explaining the startup and initialization scripts.

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Still considered a standard reference, though somewhat dated, and a bit "wooden" stylistically speaking. [1] In fact, this book was the ABS Guide author's first exposure to UNIX shell scripting, lo these many years ago.

For more information, see the Kochan-Wood website.

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

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Excellent coverage of algorithms and general programming practices. Highly recommended, but unfortunately out of print.

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Pretty good treatment of shell scripting, with examples, and a short intro to Tcl and Perl.

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This is a valiant effort at a decent shell primer, but sadly deficient in coverage on writing scripts and lacking sufficient examples.

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

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Contains a couple of sections of very informative in-depth articles on shell programming, but falls short of being a self-teaching manual. It reproduces much of the Regular Expressions tutorial from the Dougherty and Robbins book, above. The coverage of UNIX commands makes this book worthy of a place on your bookshelf.

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A treasure trove of ideas and recipes for computer-based exploration of mathematical oddities.

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The classic tutorial on problem solving methods (i.e., algorithms), with special emphasis on how to teach them.

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This manual is the definitive reference for GNU Bash. The authors of this manual, Chet Ramey and Brian Fox, are the original developers of GNU Bash. For each copy sold, the publisher donates $1 to the Free Software Foundation.

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Excellent Bash pocket reference (don't leave home without it, especially if you're a sysadmin). A bargain at $4.95, but unfortunately no longer available for free download.

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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 the ABS Guide.

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

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Very detailed and readable introduction to Linux system administration.

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

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

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Just what the title promises . . .

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An array of seven 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 $130. Buy this one, even if it means going into debt and not paying the rent.

Update: Seems to have somehow fallen out of print. Oh, well. You can still buy the books individually.

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

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Other Resources

Fioretti, Marco, "Scripting for X Productivity," Linux Journal, Issue 113, September, 2003, pp. 86-9.

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 FAQ.. This site carries the latest version of the FAQ.

Ed Schaefer's Shell Corner in Unix Review.

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 zazzybob.

Steve Parker's Shell Programming Stuff.

Giles Orr's Bash-Prompt HOWTO.

The Pixelbeat command-line reference.

Very nice sed, awk, and regular expression tutorials at The UNIX Grymoire.

Eric Pement's sed resources page.

Many interesting sed scripts at the seder's grab bag.

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

Tips and tricks at Linux Reviews.

Trent Fisher's groff tutorial.

Mark Komarinski's Printing-Usage HOWTO.

The Linux USB subsystem (helpful in writing scripts affecting USB peripherals).

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

Rick Hohensee has written the osimpa i386 assembler entirely as Bash scripts.

Aurelio Marinho Jargas has written a Regular expression wizard. He has also written an informative book on Regular Expressions, in Portuguese.

Ben Tomkins has created the Bash Navigator directory management tool.

William Park has been working on a project to incorporate certain Awk and Python features into Bash. Among these is a gdbm interface. He has released bashdiff on Freshmeat.net. He has an article in the November, 2004 issue of the Linux Gazette on adding string functions to Bash, with a followup article in the December issue, and yet another in the January, 2005 issue.

Peter Knowles has written an elaborate Bash script that generates a book list on the Sony Librie e-book reader. This useful tool facilitates loading non-DRM user content on the Librie (and the newer PRS-50X-series devices).

Tim Waugh's xmlto is an elaborate Bash script for converting Docbook XML documents to other formats.

Of historical interest are Colin Needham's original International Movie Database (IMDB) reader polling scripts, which nicely illustrate the use of awk for string parsing. Unfortunately, the URL link is broken.

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Fritz Mehner has written a bash-support plugin for the vim text editor. He has also also come up with his own stylesheet for Bash. Compare it with the ABS Guide Unofficial Stylesheet.

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Penguin Pete has quite a number of shell scripting tips and hints on his superb site. Highly recommended.

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.

John Lion's classic, A Commentary on the Sixth Edition UNIX Operating System.

The comp.os.unix.shell newsgroup.

The dd thread on Linux Questions.

The comp.os.unix.shell FAQ.

Assorted comp.os.unix FAQs.

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.