Classic Shell Scripting

Foreword

Surely I haven't been doing shell scripting for 30 years?!? Well, now that I think about it, I suppose I have, although it was only in a small way at first. (The early Unix shells, before the Bourne shell, were very primitive by modern standards, and writing substantial scripts was difficult. Fortunately, things quickly got better.)

In recent years, the shell has been neglected and underappreciated as a scripting language. But even though it was Unix's first scripting language, it's still one of the best. Its combination of extensibility and efficiency remains unique, and the improvements made to it over the years have kept it highly competitive with other scripting languages that have gotten a lot more hype. GUIs are more fashionable than command-line shells as user interfaces these days, but scripting languages often provide most of the underpinnings for the fancy screen graphics, and the shell continues to excel in that role.

The shell's dependence on other programs to do most of the work is arguably a defect, but also inarguably a strength: you get the concise notation of a scripting language plus the speed and efficiency of programs written in C (etc.). Using a common, general-purpose data representation—lines of text—in a large (and extensible) set of tools lets the scripting language plug the tools together in endless combinations. The result is far more flexibility and power than any monolithic software package with a built-in menu item for (supposedly) everything you might want. The early success of the shell in taking this approach reinforced the developing Unix philosophy of building specialized, single-purpose tools and plugging them together to do the job. The philosophy in turn encouraged improvements in the shell to allow doing more jobs that way.

Shell scripts also have an advantage over C programs—and over some of the other scripting languages too (naming no names!)—of generally being fairly easy to read and modify. Even people who are not C programmers, like a good many system administrators these days, typically feel comfortable with shell scripts. This makes shell scripting very important for extending user environments and for customizing software packages.

Indeed, there's a "wheel of reincarnation" here, which I've seen on several software projects. The project puts simple shell scripts in key places, to make it easy for users to customize aspects of the software. However, it's so much easier for the project to solve problems by working in those shell scripts than in the surrounding C code, that the scripts steadily get more complicated. Eventually they are too complicated for the users to cope with easily (some of the scripts we wrote in the C News project were notorious as stress tests for shells, never mind users!), and a new set of scripts has to be provided for user customization...

For a long time, there's been a conspicuous lack of a good book on shell scripting. Books on the Unix programming environment have touched on it, but only briefly, as one of several topics, and the better books are long out-of-date. There's reference documentation for the various shells, but what's wanted is a novice-friendly tutorial, covering the tools as well as the shell, introducing the concepts gently, offering advice on how to get the best results, and paying attention to practical issues like readability. Preferably, it should also discuss how the various shells differ, instead of trying to pretend that only one exists.

This book delivers all that, and more. Here, at last, is an up-to-date and painless introduction to the first and best of the Unix scripting languages. It's illustrated with realistic examples that make useful tools in their own right. It covers the standard Unix tools well enough to get people started with them (and to make a useful reference for those who find the manual pages a bit forbidding). I'm particularly pleased to see it including basic coverage of awk, a highly useful and unfairly neglected tool which excels in bridging gaps between other tools and in doing small programming jobs easily and concisely.

I recommend this book to anyone doing shell scripting or administering Unix-derived systems. I learned things from it; I think you will too.

Henry Spencer

SP Systems