This guide discusses concepts useful in the daily life of the serious Bash user. While a basic knowledge of the usage of the shell is required, we start with a discussion of the basic shell components and practices in the first three chapters.
Chapters four to six are discussions of basic tools that are commonly used in shell scripts.
Chapters eight to twelve discuss the most common constructs in shell scripts.
All chapters come with exercises that will test your preparedness for the next chapter.
Chapter 1, Bash and Bash scripts: Bash basics: why Bash is so good, building blocks, first guidelines on developing good scripts.
Chapter 2, Writing and debugging scripts: Script basics: writing and debugging.
Chapter 3, The Bash environment: The Bash Environment: initialization files, variables, quoting characters, shell expansion order, aliases, options.
Chapter 4, Regular expressions: Regular expressions: an introduction.
Chapter 5, The GNU sed stream editor: Sed: an introduction to the sed line editor.
Chapter 6, The GNU awk programming language:Awk: introduction to the awk programming language.
Chapter 7, Conditional statements: Conditional statements: constructs used in Bash to test conditions.
Chapter 8, Writing interactive scripts: Interactive scripts: making scripts user-friendly, catching user input.
Chapter 9, Repetitive tasks: Executing commands repetitively: constructs used in Bash to automate command execution.
Chapter 10, More on variables: Advanced variables: specifying variable types, introduction to arrays of variables, operations on variables.
Chapter 11, Functions: Functions: an introduction.
Chapter 12, Catching signals: Catching signals: introduction to process signalling, trapping user-sent signals.