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

~ (Author), Cameron Newham (Author), J P Vossen (Author)
Key Phrases: shell variables, getting user input, using configuration files, Solution Use, Getting Started, Custom Configuration (more...)

4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)

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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The key to mastering any Unix system, especially Linux and Mac OS X, is a thorough knowledge of shell scripting. Scripting is a way to harness and customize the power of any Unix system, and it's an essential skill for any Unix users, including system administrators and professional OS X developers. But beneath this simple promise lies a treacherous ocean of variations in Unix commands and standards.

"bash Cookbook" teaches shell scripting the way Unix masters practice the craft. It presents a variety of recipes and tricks for all levels of shell programmers so that anyone can become a proficient user of the most common Unix shell -- the bash shell -- and cygwin or other popular Unix emulation packages. Packed full of useful scripts, along with examples that explain how to create better scripts, this new cookbook gives professionals and power users everything they need to automate routine tasks and enable them to truly manage their systems -- rather than have their systems manage them.

About the Author

Newham is an information technology developer living in the United Kingdom. After completing a Bachelor of Science degree in information technology and geography at the University of Western Australia, he worked for Australian Defence Industries for several years. He is now an IT contractor based in London.

Product Details

Paperback: 598 pages
Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (May 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596526784
ISBN-13: 978-0596526788
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.3 x 1.3 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #20,709 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)
Popular in these categories: (What's this?)
#2 in Books > Computers & Internet > Operating Systems > Unix > Shell
#6 in Books > Computers & Internet > Operating Systems > Linux

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This is item 7 in The O'Reilly Cookbooks Series.

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Carl Albing

Cameron Hewham

Inside This Book (learn more)

Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
shell variables, getting user input, using configuration files, testing scripts, entire session, reusing code, setting default values, debugging scripts, validating input, viewing photos, solution set, cookbook filename, getting bash, customizing bash, trailing tab, using chroot jails, man reformat, bash manpage, literal tab character, man regex, portable shell scripts, programmable completion, print strftime, help printf, builtin echo

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Solution Use, Getting Started, Custom Configuration, Intermediate Shell Tools, Customizing Your Prompt, Finding Files, Red Hat, Fedora Core, Adding the Current Directory, Basic Scripting, Creating Self-Contained, Saving Output, Writing Output, Finding World-Writable Directories, Using Functions, Change Exported Variables, Mastering Regular Expressions, Chet Ramey, Discussion There, Arnold Robbins, Getting Input, Trimming Whitespace, Looping Over Arguments Passed, Writing Secure Shell Scripts, Parsing Command-Line Arguments

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	78% buy the item featured on this page: Bash Cookbook: Solutions and Examples for Bash Users (Cookbooks (O'Reilly)) 4.6 out of 5 stars (12) $31.49
	10% buy Learning the bash Shell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) 4.1 out of 5 stars (33) $23.07
	6% buy Classic Shell Scripting 4.6 out of 5 stars (10) $17.96
	3% buy sed & awk (2nd Edition) 4.3 out of 5 stars (40) $23.07

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Customer Reviews

12 Reviews

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4.6 out of 5 stars (12 customer reviews)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Solutions to problems for bash users of all skill levels, June 25, 2007

By	calvinnme "Texan refugee" (Fredericksburg, Va) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

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, "Tips and Traps", deals with the common mistakes that bash users make.

All in all this is a very handy reference for a vast number of the tasks that you'll come across when scripting with the bash shell along with well-commented code. Highly recommended.

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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Keep it close, you will use it, February 29, 2008

By	Gordon Ewasiuk (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews

These O'Reilly Cookbooks should be on every sysadmin's shelf. The Bash Cookbook is no different. Incredibly useful book. I didn't read it cover to cover but have gone back to it at least 15-20 times to pull out nuggets of info. The real-world, practical examples and solutions offered in this book provide the sysadmin with a virtual swiss army knife when working with bash.

Book was so useful, I bought two extra copies and sent them to coworkers.

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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars it was worth waiting for it, October 30, 2008

By	Tiberius (Cyberspace) - See all my reviews

More than ten years after the first edition of Learning the bash Shell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) came out, there appeared a book that sums up all the experience and expertise the authors have gained since those times using this shell. If you're new to Unix/Linux, start with the work linked in above, but if you have been using either of these systems for some time and you would like to learn how to make your life easier, then this is the book for you.

Why? Because it concentrates on teaching you how to solve your problems. After a brief introduction and setting the basics the real depth begins: 1. a problem, 2. developing a solution, 3. evaluating the solution. And lots of examples. Naturally, the first step is to recognise that you have a problem, which the book also teaches you: some people tend to suffer while doing a repetitive and uninteresting chore but does not even occur to them that it does not need to be so: they can turn the chore into a hunt for automatisation putting their brain to some creative use, so instead of numbing their mind they start sharping it, and this is exactly where this book comes in.

Presently, amazon.com does not offer you a look into the book, but you can have a preview of every chapter and also a full view of the table of contents at the publisher's page: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596526788/toc.html. Than come back here, as Amazon's price is much better. (At the time of writing this, there is a 37% discount.)

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Very good book
Good book about bash. If you are not a bash expert, but you like bash, then read it and your bash skill will be improved. Read more

Published 2 months ago by i5513

5.0 out of 5 stars Paid for itself in 5 minutes
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... Read more

Published 8 months ago by Anne Dudfield

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Cookbook
Bash Cookbook is a great book for anyone who is interested in learning more about bash and shell scripting. Read more

Published 9 months ago by Andrei Mouravski

5.0 out of 5 stars Great book, but not for beginners
Great examples and excellent explanations on why users should do (or not do) things in certain ways when using BASH. Read more

Published 9 months ago by Zaine Ridling

5.0 out of 5 stars Good book to read
I like this book. I will recommend it to someone who has some bash experience since it's not organized as a reference or study guide.

Published 11 months ago by Ying Zuo

1.0 out of 5 stars cookbook is right- teaches you nothing and awful for a novice
When I read the description the book said that "bash Cookbook" teaches shell scripting the way Unix masters practice the craft." Not even close. Read more

Published 14 months ago by Ross

5.0 out of 5 stars What I've been waiting for!
This book is indeed a "Cookbook"; nice examples on how to do lots of stuff. It is nicely categorized and the explanations/discussions are easy to follow. Read more

Published 17 months ago by Espen Vorland

5.0 out of 5 stars Good collection of recipes. Covers bash 3.2
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... Read more

Published 18 months ago by Nikolai N Bezroukov

5.0 out of 5 stars Taking Bash to the next level
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... Read more

Published on July 23, 2007 by T. Full

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