Portable Shell Programming: Extensive Collection of Bourne Shell Examples Hewlett-Packard Professional Books: Amazon.co.uk: Bruce Blinn: Books

Product Description

Product Description
For software development engineers, system administrators, and QA test engineers who work with UNIX computer systems.

This complete guide shows how to use the shell to develop shell scripts, using the shell more like a programming language than a command interpreter. Covers shell syntax, portability on different UNIX systems, using shell scripts to catch or ignore signals, executing commands using the remote shell command, and using the shell's redirection syntaxes.

About the Author

Bruce Blinn has worked with Hewlett-Packard for over thirteen years, and is currently a member of the technical staff working on the HP-UX operating system. In 1990, he was one of the founders of Clarity Software, Inc., producers of a multimedia text processing product named Rapport. It was at Clarity Software that he developed his expertise in shell programming.

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Customer Reviews

10 Reviews

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

Average Customer Review

4.7 out of 5 stars (10 customer reviews)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book of script examples., 4 Aug 1998

By A Customer

A great book for learning shell scripting. It starts out with general syntax but then the rest of the book in filled with micro examples of things you need to write scripts, like input, output, prompting, changing case, manipulating strings, parsing and extracting data, finding file sizes, checking free space, setting screen echo on/off, read with a timeout, text substitution, doing math, here files, etc. There are also sections on portability, debugging, and common problems. I am very happy with this book and use it often when I am scripting.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good reference, 5 May 1998

By A Customer

This has proven to be an excellent reference. It provides lots of examples of common shell constructs and presents them in a format which should run well on bourne, korn, POSIX, and compatible interpreters.

For example, I was unclear on the proper syntax for a simple "if" statement with a string comparison until I read this book. Syntax is presented up-front in the first chapter so there are no lingering doubts later on.

It answered a lot of questions I still had after I finished "Learning the Korn Shell" from O'Reilley.

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Practical" is meaningful in this case!, 10 April 1998

By A Customer

As opposed to other books with "practical" in the title, this one lives up to its name. I found Chapters 4 (Using Files), 5 (The Environment), and 7 (Using Filters) very helpful. The book is full of many examples of practical things, such as how to delete all blank lines in a file. This makes is valuable for the beginner, and the later chapters contain information for the more advanced shell programmer.

I got this book at a time when the guy who wrote all our shell scripts quit without notice. This book was a lifesaver, as I had to write short (and not so short) shell scripts to automate certain tasks & understand the work he did.

I would like to see more discussion in Chapter 7 (Using Filters) about combining the use of sed and the Unix/Linux command tr. I find that I have to use these together sometimes as one does things the other can't handle. This is the only suggestion I have to improve an already useful book.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Only 50% book is relevant to learning Shell Programming
This books covers shell programming in too much detail. I would have prefered an overview of the sysnatx of shell programming with some relevant small examples. Read more

Published on 22 Feb 2001

5.0 out of 5 stars Recommended for Beginners and experienced programmer
Lots of examples and well explained. This book is well presented and life saver for beginners scripter. Good job Bruce Blinn.

Published on 7 Oct 1998

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent!
I bought this book more than 2 years ago and I have not been able to find another better book to displace it, except to supplement it. Read more

Published on 31 Mar 1998

5.0 out of 5 stars A concise, readable reference for the Bourne shell.
This is the one shell programming book that every engineer will want to have on their desktop. It is concise without being cryptic; Blinn's prose style is clear and... Read more

Published on 17 Mar 1998

5.0 out of 5 stars Excelent book Bruce, please do the same with PERL!!
This was exactly what I needed to get up and running with understanding and writing UNIX shell scripts. Read more

Published on 10 Feb 1998

5.0 out of 5 stars For struggling shell programmers, you will be Bourne again
This is the most complete and concise book for Bourne shell programming that I have ever seen. The pages are filled with examples and descriptions of how each line of code works... Read more

Published on 2 Aug 1997

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent resouce. Learned more in one day than two years!
This book is full of tips, tricks and gottchas that take most people years to learn the hard way. Plenty of examples of right and wrong ways to do things. Read more

Published on 18 Jul 1996

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Portable Shell Programming: Extensive Collection of Bourne Shell Examples (Hewlett-Packard Professional Books) (Paperback)

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