Perth Linux Users' Group

September 2004 Seminar

Title: Shell scripting: why, how, and what not to do
When: Tuesday, 14 September 2004, 7:30pm - 9:00pm
Where: Central TAFE Lecture Theatre, Perth
Presenter: Cameron Patrick

This talk will be a short introduction to shell scripting, followed by some examples from real shell scripts illustrating how the concepts fit together. Some basic programming knowledge and a moderate understanding of Linux command-line usage will be assumed.

Slides and examples: Slides from this talk are available in Openoffice.org format [12kb] or PDF format [60kb]. A tar.gz file containing the example scripts [13kb] is also available.

Craig Ringer comments:

> A couple of quick suggestions/ideas:
>
> It might be an idea to mention that you're covering berkley-compatible
> scripting, and there is another flavour (csh/tcsh/ksh) out there.
>
> It might also be worth mentioning that arguments can be passed on the
> hashbang line, eg:
> #!/bin/bash -eu
>
> Finally, I think 'bash -u' / 'set -u' deserves special mention, as it's
> perhaps the single most important thing to make bash scripting less evil
> and help the script writer retain their sanity. What crack-head thought
> "Well, if the variable is invalid let's just substitute an empty string"
> anyway? *grumble*
>
> I'd personally put 'See: autotools" in the section about reading other
> people's code as a BRILLIANT example of a "don't" but that's just me :-P

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