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Wicked Cool Shell Scripts [Paperback]

Dave Taylor (Author)
4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)


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Book Description

1593270127 978-1593270124 January 15, 2004 1st

Fun and functional Linux, Mac OS X and UNIX shell scripts

The UNIX shell is the main scripting environment of every Linux, Mac OS X and UNIX system, whether a rescued laptop or a million-dollar mainframe. This cookbook of useful, customizable, and fun scripts gives you the tools to solve common Linux, Mac OS X and UNIX problems and personalize your computing environment. Among the more than 100 scripts included are an interactive calculator, a spell checker, a disk backup utility, a weather tracker, and a web logfile analysis tool. The book also teaches you how to write your own sophisticated shell scripts by explaining the syntax and techniques used to build each example scripts. Examples are written in Bourne Shell (sh) syntax.



Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Dave Taylor has a Masters degree in Education, an MBA, and has written a dozen technical books, including Learning UNIX for Mac OS X (O'Reilly), Solaris for Dummies (Hungry Minds), and Teach Yourself UNIX in 24 Hours (SAMS). He was a contributor to BSD 4.4 UNIX, and his software is included in many major UNIX distributions.


Product Details

  • Paperback: 488 pages
  • Publisher: No Starch Press; 1st edition (January 15, 2004)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1593270127
  • ISBN-13: 978-1593270124
  • Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.2 x 0.9 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
  • Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (37 customer reviews)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #242,068 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

37 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.2 out of 5 stars (37 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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53 of 55 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Surprised me, March 2, 2004
This review is from: Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (Paperback)
I often take a dim view of books that use superlatives in their titles. I also don't think there is anything "wicked cool" about shell scripting in general: if you need anything complex at all, Perl or something else is probably a much better way to to it. Shell scripting gets awfully nasty awfully fast.

However, I was wrong. Yes, shell scripting is an abominable way to approach most of the tasks this book explores. Just the same, the author does it "wicked cool" and you can learn a lot both from how he sees the problem and the other Unix tools he uses as part of the script. So while you might shudder at the idea of writing a link-checker in Bash, the author's clever use of Lynx's "traverse" flag is something you might make use of elsewhere. You'll find useful things like that throughout the book, and even if you'd rather write it in Perl or whatever, the logic is worth examining.

Mac OS X users will appreciate that a whole chapter is devoted to that. There's nothing particularly deep there, nothing you will be surprised by, but it's nice to see Mac get specific mention. That brings up another important point: shells are different and Unixes are different. The author does pay a lot of attention to the differences that can cause problems for your scripts when they need to run on different platforms.

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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars Try Scripting Web Applications, March 2, 2004
This review is from: Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (Paperback)
The book is aimed at all users and systems administrators of linux and every unix variant, including most importantly the MacOS. If you already know some scripting, you should be quite at ease here. Taylor does decide to restrict his discussion to the Bourne shell and its descendent, bash. He drops the C shell! But, as he points out, the scripts he gives can be easily rewritten in the latter if you desire.

The book can be roughly divided into two parts. The first is essentially traditional scripting tasks. A user from 1988 would see original material here, but no qualitative surprises.

The second half of the book is more interesting. It centres on Web applications. For example, when running a Web server that uses CGI, Perl and C are often the choice for implementing logic. But sometimes you can get by with a simpler approach - using a Bourne shell. Taylor shows how to do this to make simple web pages, with images, even. Cool! Though this outlook lacks the full expressive power of generating dynamic pages via Java Server Pages/Servlets, these latter alternatives can be quite forbidding to learn. If you are already comfortable with sed, awk, grep [etc], you may want to try this approach, provided your web site is not too complex.

In summary, the web scripting approach suggested here may be the most distinctive and useful sections. Worth checking out.

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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars geeks only, August 12, 2006
This review is from: Wicked Cool Shell Scripts (Paperback)
Taylor does some neat stuff with shell scripts, but he doesn't spend much time explaining what goes on in them. Each is accompanied by a terse paragraph explaining "how it works", which generally only addresses one particular aspect of the script (ie, POSIX-style "variable slicing"). Shell syntax is terse and many of the reserved keywords and functions are not self-evident. If you don't know, for example, what "${#remainder}" returns, Taylor won't help you; you will have to look it up in a tutorial or a reference work elsewhere.

According to the blurb on the back of the book, Taylor has an MA in education, but there is little evidence of his didactic skills in this text. On the face of it, he is more a geek than a teacher, and hence this book more useful to his fellow hackers than people new to Bash.
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