Learning the bash Shell, 2nd Edition 2nd Edition

by Cameron Newham (Author), Bill Rosenblatt (Author)

27 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-1565923478

ISBN-10: 1565923472

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Learning the bash Shell: Unix Shell Programming (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly))
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The first thing users of the Linux operating system come face to face with is the shell. "Shell" is the UNIX term for a user interface to the system -- something that lets you communicate with the computer via the keyboard and display. Bash, the Free Software Foundation's "Bourne Again Shell," is the default shell for Linux, the popular free UNIX-like operating system. It's also a replacement for the standard UNIX Bourne shell, which serves both as a user interface and as a programming language. Like the FSF's other tools, bash is more than a mere replacement: it extends the Bourne shell in many ways. Features include command line editing, key bindings, integrated programming features, command completion, control structures (especially the select construct, which enables you to create menus easily), and new ways to customize your environment.Whether you want to use bash for its user interface or its programming features you will find Learning the bash Shell a valuable guide. The book covers all of bash's features, both for interactive use and programming. If you are new to shell programming, Learning the bash Shell provides an excellent introduction, covering everything from the most basic to the most advanced features, like signal handling and command line processing. If you've been writing shell scripts for years, it offers a great way to find out what the new shell offers. The book is full of examples of shell commands and programs that are designed to be useful in your everyday life as a user, not just to illustrate the feature being explained. All of these examples are freely available to you online on the Internet.This second edition covers all of the features of bash Version 2.0, while still applying to bash Version 1.x. New features include the addition of one-dimensional arrays, parameter expansion, and more pattern-matching operations. bash 2.0 provides even more conformity with POSIX.2 standards, and in POSIX.2 mode is completely POSIX.2 conformant. This second edition covers several new commands, security improvements, additions to ReadLine, improved configuration and installation, and an additional programming aid, the bash shell debugger.With this book you'll learn:

How to install bash as your login shell
The basics of interactive shell use, including UNIX file and directory structures, standard I/O, and background jobs
Command line editing, history substitution, and key bindings
How to customize your shell environment without programming
The nuts and bolts of basic shell programming, flow control structures, command-line options and typed variables
Process handling, from job control to processes, coroutines and subshells
Debugging techniques, such as trace and verbose modes
Techniques for implementing system-wide shell customization and features related to system security

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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Cameron Newham lives in Perth, Western Australia. After completing a Bachelor of Science majoring in information technology and geography at the University of Western Australia, Cameron joined Universal Defence Systems (later to become Australian Defence Industries) as a software engineer. He has been with ADI for six years, working on various aspects of command and control systems. In his spare time Cameron can be found surfing the Internet, ballroom dancing, or driving his sports car. He also has more than a passing interest in space science, 3D graphics, synthesiser music, and Depeche Mode. Bill Rosenblatt is author of the the O'Reilly Nutshell Handbook® Learning the Korn Shell; co-author, with Deb Cameron, of Learning GNU Emacs; and a contributor to UNIX Power Tools. He is director of publishing systems at the Times Mirror Company in New York City and a columnist in SunWorld Online magazine on the World Wide Web. Bill received a B.S.E. from Princeton University and an M.S. and A.B.D. from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, each in some variant of computer science. His interests in the computing field include multimedia databases, electronic publishing, and object- oriented systems. Outside of the computing field, he's interested in jazz, classical music, antique maps, and Sherlock Holmes pastiche novels. Bill lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He wishes his landlord allowed pets so that he could truthfully claim to have a dog and cat with suitably droll names like "Coltrane" and "Ravel."

Bill Rosenblatt is president of GiantSteps/Media Technology Strategies, a consulting firm in New York City. Before founding GiantSteps, Bill was CTO of Fathom, an online content and education company associated with Columbia University and other scholarly institutions. He has been a technology executive at McGraw-Hill and Times Mirror, and head of strategic marketing for media and publishing at Sun Microsystems. Bill was also one of the architects of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), a standard for online content identification and DRM.

Product details

Publisher : O'Reilly Media; 2nd edition (January 26, 1998)
Language : English
Paperback : 336 pages
ISBN-10 : 1565923472
ISBN-13 : 978-1565923478
Item Weight : 1.19 pounds
Dimensions : 7 x 0.81 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #924,503 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #50 in Unix Shell
- #249 in Macintosh Operating System
- #433 in Computer Operating Systems (Books)

Customer Reviews:
27 ratings

Customer reviews

5 star		33%
4 star		21%
3 star		26%
2 star		5%
1 star		14%

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Top reviews from the United States

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J. L. Shipp

Can't Live Without It

Reviewed in the United States on September 2, 2002

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O'Reilly has become the de facto for techie books. They are immensely helpful when you just want to dig your feet in and get hardcore with coding. They make for easy reads. Examples are practical and clear.
I find this book to be a great reference tool when working on the Unix command line in the Bash Shell environment. I highly recommend this book if not for reading purposes but as an excellent source of feedback if you are not sure what commands you should be using.
Whilst you do have manpages, which are often handy, this book brings you clarity and elaboration when coding may not come to you that easy as it does for others. Learn Bash without bashing your skull on the keyboard in frustration.

3 people found this helpful

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Noel McKinney

Good bus reading

Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2001

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You want to learn Bash, use it, read man pages, whatever. If Bash is the shell you chose, maybe you don't need a book because you can learn what you need at the terminal. I like this book because sometimes I don't have a terminal in front of me, like when I'm sitting on the bus in the morning. So I have this book with me, and I read a few pages rather than stare out the window. It's cheap, so what the heck, if you are a Bash user and feel like there's more to learn then grab it.

4 people found this helpful

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M. Helmke

Good introduction and reference resource

Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2005

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This is a useful introduction to the Bash shell used in unix, linux, and other *nix type operating systems. It takes you from a very basic introduction into deeper concepts including shell scripting and customization. Highly recommended for the niche market it is intended to reach. I found it clear, useful and detailed without being dull.

2 people found this helpful

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LoriSaysHey

The best book on Bash!

Reviewed in the United States on June 21, 2013

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Anything I've purchased by O'Reilly is the best stuff on Unix and Unix tools! This book helped me write a bash script that is being used by hundreds where I work.

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DaveG

It was in great shape and cheap

Reviewed in the United States on December 12, 2012

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The book was in great shape and couldn't beat the price Cheap.
GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD

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Jascha Casadio

A bitter sweet introduction to the bash shell and its basic features.

Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2015

I've told myself to get a book about bash so many times in the past that my Goodread`s Want to Read shelf was getting boringly monothematic. Last month I planned to get my hands on bash Cookbook but a comment on Amazon convinced me to dedicate my time to this title instead. To make it short, I'm not exactly enthusiast: some (just some!) parts were interesting; others (most!) were overly detailed and accompanied with complicated examples, a pain to get through.

This is a book that clearly targets beginners, people with close to no experience with Linux and the bash shell. If you work on a daily basis with the penguin, you better move along.

Ok so, let's imagine I recently moved from Windows to Linux and I want to explore what the bash shell offers me. What do I get off these 300 pages? Well, the book is divided in 3 parts:

Very basic shell features.
Basic shell scripting.
Basic shell features.

The first part, which covers the first three chapters, tells you about basic commands, such as "ls" and all the arguments it swallows. Unless you have never opened the terminal before, you might want to skip these pages.

Next the authors introduce some basic shell scripting, starting from variable naming to arrays and flow control. This was, by far, the most interesting part of the whole book in my opinion, but still, the author has covered only the very basics. What I've found particularly annoying was the choice to list all the possible options available just to find out, later, that the book wasn't about system programming so that they would have not been explained.

Finally, we leave the magic world of scripting and get introduced to other basic features, such as jobs: background foreground, handling signals.

Throughout the book the authors use an example that gets improved as they introduce new concepts. This gets early out of control in my opinion: it's overly hard to follow, mainly for a beginner. A very annoying thing of this example is the fact that the authors names variables, functions and files using Alice in Wonderland: Alice, the Hatter, ... for real?

Other examples are found in the book. They are short ad hoc code snippets found next to some command just explained. I've often ended up either using man or googling to find more.

I don't really suggest the title, neither to those new to the bash shell, nor to those that are merely interested in scripting. This book covers a little of both, but doesn't really give any value.

Suggested book(s):
Linux Shell Scripting Cookbook

As usual, you can find more reviews on my personal blog: http://books.lostinmalloc.com. Feel free to pass by and share your thoughts!

One person found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Good Intro To Bash Use; Lacks Robust Code Examples

Reviewed in the United States on June 3, 2001

This O'Reilly Publication does a good job in filling a void for a good introduction to Bash Shell scripting. Bash has become the shell script programming choice for most Unix and Linux shell programmers, because of its strengths over C shell (Csh) and other Unix-based Shell environments as a fairly robust freeware script programming language.
Strengths of the publication are the clear explanations of the bash shell programming environment, the effective use of tables to summarize basic shell language and programming constructs, UNIX-based utilities, shell environment customization, shell Syntax, Bash File Operators and control key definitions.
A chapter is devoted to edit mode capabilities (both eMacs and Vi Command-Line Editing Commands are covered and summarized effectively in clearly doucmented tables).
The book contains a number of terse script programming tasks, which provide clear examples of the material presented in the text. These program examples are reworked to provide a clear example of how Bash scripts can be modified to provide greater flexibility and reusability of Bash shell program code.
I would like to see more robust programming shell examples in the book as examples of mini-applications, which Bash is frequently used for in many Unix-based or Unix-derived platforms. The "Task 5-1" program example is an example where a good example of a program, which does an adequate job of clearly covering the use of Bash File Operators, yet the author(s) make the statement that the code is "relatively long winded".
Another area the book could address is the use of Bash in a Windows environment. I was able to port some of the programming tasks presented to a Windows 95/98 environment using the GNU Bash Version 2.03 for Windows package available on the internet.
Despite these drawbacks, I rate the book four stars on the strengths that it is the only readily-available publication, which is solely devoted to Bash shell use and programming. The O'Reilly publication is definitely worth the investment, if you are looking for a book to get you started on Bash Shell Script programming on a Unix, Linux or Windows (to a limited degree) environment.

5 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

richieloco

Good but too basic

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 23, 2019

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It’s a good book. Covers the basics well... but that is about it really. It’s just a bit too basic.

Luke Wakefield

Three Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 23, 2015

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If you have no previous experience of BASH, this book might be a bit hard.

"fperut"

Excellent

Reviewed in Japan on January 2, 2005

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This is definitely an excellent book, a must for anyone interested in learning about UNIX or Linux OS. It not only gives a good understanding on how to write scripts for bash shell but also gives a good description of process handling, job control, signal. It is also very well written and with plenty of good examples and exercices. I did not loose my money when I purchased this book !

2 people found this helpful

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