Customer Reviews

Wicked Cool Shell Scripts

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3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

Another one of my goals this year is to get familiar with Linux and shell scripting. I have some "how to" books, but I also picked up Dave Taylor's Wicked Cool Shell Scripts - 101 Scripts For Linux, Mac OS X, and UNIX Systems (No Starch Press). Taylor's done a great job with this book.

Chapter List: Introduction; The Missing Code Library; Improving on User Commands; Creating Utilities; Tweaking Unix; System Administration: Managing Users; System Administration: System Maintenance; Web and Internet Users; Webmaster Hacks; Web and Internet Administration; Internet Server Administration; Mac OS X Scripts; Shell Script Fun and Games; Afterword; Index

Taylor didn't write this book as a tutorial on script writing. Rather, he wanted to provide a "cookbook" of scripts that people could learn from and use immediately. He also wanted something more interesting than the scripts normally found in the how to books on the market. I'd agree that he's accomplished his purpose. Each script starts with a listing of the code and an explanation of how it works. He shows you how to run the script and what the results of running the script should be. Finally, there's a "hacking the script" paragraph that explains how you might want to modify the script to do something different. This entire package of paragraphs in each script serves as a sort of "mini-lesson" on some aspect of script writing.

As I mentioned above, I'm not quite ready for this book right now. When I pick up some fundamentals, I'll be heading into the Web and Internet Users section. There's code there on using Lynx and shell scripts to strip out information from websites. I have a project in mind I've wanted to do for some time, and I think I finally found the tools that will allow me to do it.

As a side note: LinuxWorld Magazine voted this book the Best Shell Script Programming Book of 2004. So I'm not the only one who thinks it's pretty good...

A well-written book packed with a ton of practical information. If you have a background in shell scripting and you want to stretch a little, this is the book for you...

Folks, if scripts intimidate you in any way, this book is great! It brings practical scripts in a wide variety of areas to you. Once you learn these scripts, it's easy to customize them to meet your needs.

If you're really interested in becoming a Linux Sysadmin, you need to know how to script. Once you learn these scripts, you'll be able to demonstrate your knowledge on any interview!

WICKED COOL SHELL SCRIPTS is a collection of pre-made bash scripts for various tasks similar to one of O'Reilly's "cookbooks". All scripts here use bash--the author rejects csh because of Tom Christiansen's classic essay "Csh Programming Considered Harmful" and the Korn shell because he considers it fine for interactive use but not so good for scripting.

The basic format of each entry is first the problem--what the user wants to do--then the code, followed sometimes by an explanation and advice on hacking the code. The book is not really an introduction to Bash scripting. If you want a systematic primer I'd recommend O'Reilly's LEARNING THE BASH SHELL or any of a dozen libre tutorials.

Some of the scripts are useful and solve problems I've occasionally faced. For example, the GNU units program can't do temperature conversions, but a script is given here which uses bc to provide a solution. Quite elegant is a script with which the user can find the time anywhere in the world by querying in a friendly manner the system's zoneinfo files. In spite of some neat gimmicks, however, I don't think I can really recommend the book unless you're someone about to take a voyage on the south seas and won't have Internet access. Many of these scripts can be found on the Web, and far too many scripts here solve problems already long solved by available programs. The author describes a secure version of locate, when slocate is already easily installable on most *nix systems. A script for rotating log files is done when metalog and other common log programs do this automatically. Take out all these unnecessary scripts, and the amount of useful content in the book turns out to be very low indeed.

This is a collection of very basic shell scripts I found completely useless. The author presents the book in an advanced format, not giving much underlying information or hand-holding; however the information contained is very beginner level.

The author David Taylor also has many bad habits in his scripting and tends to take a wordy approach. Many of the scripts Taylor advertises in his book can be compiled into a command or two on a single small line of code. For example why would you pipe a grep command to awk when awk has a more powerful search function than grep already built in?

I did not find any advanced commands in his entire book. There were a couple very basic 'sed' and 'awk' commands but nothing which made me think anything about them was 'wicked cool'

Kirk McElhearn's "The Mac OS X Command Line: Unix Under the Hood" recommended this book for those who want to take shell scripting deeper (along with a Perl book) and I'm glad he did. There's a lot of ground Dave Taylor covers and by design the 101 scripts are surprisingly helpful for day-to-day usage and computer management. As Mr. Taylor writes in his intro, the quality of the scripts in this book far surpass what you might find after spending a lot of time Googling and then tweaking for your platform. He understands the differences of the various platforms and how you should tweak accordingly. The author has a lively writing style (particularly for a computer book).

This is one of those rare reference books that really needs to be on the reference shelf.

I'd recommend this book highly for anyone who wants to understand scripting even just a little bit, or just be more of a power-user of Linux, Unix, or OS X. It's written clearly and simply enough for almost anyone to understand it, and anyone will find some use for at least a few of the scripts presented. For more hardcore scripters, it may not have anything new in the code, but the book's approach to automating tasks is still pretty inspiring.

I'm an IT Manager with a lot of experience in admin, less in programming. But how can you avoid having to understand shell scripting? You can't, but like everything else, if you do it rarely it's hard to remember everything--and you don't always think "I can write a script to do that" even when it's the best solution to a problem.

Mostly in the past I've only edited existing scripts, or written half-baked ones to automate a single repetitive task (for file in * ...). Since buying this book, I'm saving myself time and even making a little money writing scripts, and I'm thoroughly enjoying every minute of it. I feel like I'm getting smarter again, and this book is a big part of that.

I think it'll also be especially helpful to OS X users who want to be more knowledgeable about Unix and what their computers are capable of now. Other good targets are webmasters, administrators of small to medium-sized networks (including home networks), and anyone who just wants to be more of a power-user.

You know what I like best about this book? It reminds me of the time when the computer users I knew ALL knew how to program--when the point of using a computer was to program it. We're still there, we just forgot about it. You can be that powerful of a user, still, and this book will get you there.

I guess it's always difficult deciding on whether to buy a techy book like this one - particularly if you're ordering on the web. Fortunately, I bought my copy from one of those old-fashioned book shops and was able to browse through the scripts before making the decision :-)

This book has some very useful scripts in it. They probably won't be *exactly* what you're looking for, but they are good examples that can easily be adapted and appended to help you work smarter/faster.

The accompanying descriptions are written so that those who are unfamiliar with the shell will have enough information to get the scripts up and running - and those who are familiar with the shell won't feel patronized.

Being a Mac scripter myself, I also like the fact that the author *likes* OS X and has included lots of OS X-specific information in the book.

This would be a useful addition to the library of a Mac user who wants to move from plain *user* to *power-user* :-)