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Bash Cookbook
Chad_Wollenberg writes "Anyone who has used a derivative of Unix over the past 20 years has used Bash, which stands for Borne Again Shell. The geek in all of us makes us want to extend our ability to rule the command line. To truly master a Unix environment, you need to know a shell, and Bash is easily the most popular of them. Any Unix/Linux/BSD administrator knows the power at your fingertips is fully extended by what you can do within the Bash environment, and all of us need the best recipes to get the job done." Keep reading for the rest of Chad's review.
Bash Cookbook
author
Carl Albing, JP Vossen, Cameron Newham
pages
598
publisher
O'Reilly
rating
9
reviewer
Chad Wollenberg
ISBN
978-0-596-52678-8
summary
A good book for intermediate and above users of Bash
Enter Bash Cookbook. Properly named for the series of O'reilly books that gives you valuable information on subjects in the form of recipes, this book was refreshing in that it was properly organized, and surprisingly contemporary, even citing Virtualized platforms as a way to try out different OS's for Bash. The book does a good job of pointing out the different operating systems that do run Bash, even citing Cygwin for Windows. They also use the POSIX standard, so that all of the examples are portable across platforms.
Bash Cookbook is by no means for the feint of heart. It seems that the book is meant for intermediate and above users of Bash. However, the first several chapters do a significant job of over viewing basic concepts of Bash navigation and combing simple commands. The book quickly changes gears to complex statements on how to get things done in Bash.
By Chapter 7, Bash Cookbook extends out of Bash commands and begins exploring combining the power of bash scripting with useful command such as grep, awk, and sed. To quote the authors, "if our scripting examples are going to tackle real-world problems, they need to use the wider range of tools that are actually used by real-world bash users and programmers." And that is exactly what they do. This chapter alone gave me the ability to do more in the command line environment simply by explaining the functions of the scripts put forth. That is something that any reader, intermediate to expert, can take from this book. The detailed explanations really do give everyone the ability to learn something about the commands, and the references to additional resources often lead me to the computer, looking up further details.
I found Chapter 11 to be very useful (pun intended) finally grasping some concepts on the find command that have previously escaped me. From Chapter 12 on, the book focuses on writing useful and complex scripts. This is where the book really begins to shine for the Unix enthusiast and system administrator. The scripts found in Chapter 12, and their elaborate descriptions begin to show the true power of Bash scripting, and how much you can automate. Chapter 14 is about securing your scripts, and is a heavy read, but well worth reading for any administrator that would be using their scripts in a production environment.
Just when you think this book has reached its limits, it gives very handy customization examples in Chapter 16 on how to configure and customize Bash. And also goes into common mistakes made by the novice user. Combine all of that with the Appendices for quick reference, and this book has not left my side since it arrived. While I would not recommend this book for the novice user, I would recommend this book to any system administrator that has to work with Unix or Linux. If nothing else, the examples given here are full of good, reusable code to make tasks easier in your day to day functions. Well done.
You can purchase Bash Cookbook from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Bash Cookbook is by no means for the feint of heart. It seems that the book is meant for intermediate and above users of Bash. However, the first several chapters do a significant job of over viewing basic concepts of Bash navigation and combing simple commands. The book quickly changes gears to complex statements on how to get things done in Bash.
By Chapter 7, Bash Cookbook extends out of Bash commands and begins exploring combining the power of bash scripting with useful command such as grep, awk, and sed. To quote the authors, "if our scripting examples are going to tackle real-world problems, they need to use the wider range of tools that are actually used by real-world bash users and programmers." And that is exactly what they do. This chapter alone gave me the ability to do more in the command line environment simply by explaining the functions of the scripts put forth. That is something that any reader, intermediate to expert, can take from this book. The detailed explanations really do give everyone the ability to learn something about the commands, and the references to additional resources often lead me to the computer, looking up further details.
I found Chapter 11 to be very useful (pun intended) finally grasping some concepts on the find command that have previously escaped me. From Chapter 12 on, the book focuses on writing useful and complex scripts. This is where the book really begins to shine for the Unix enthusiast and system administrator. The scripts found in Chapter 12, and their elaborate descriptions begin to show the true power of Bash scripting, and how much you can automate. Chapter 14 is about securing your scripts, and is a heavy read, but well worth reading for any administrator that would be using their scripts in a production environment.
Just when you think this book has reached its limits, it gives very handy customization examples in Chapter 16 on how to configure and customize Bash. And also goes into common mistakes made by the novice user. Combine all of that with the Appendices for quick reference, and this book has not left my side since it arrived. While I would not recommend this book for the novice user, I would recommend this book to any system administrator that has to work with Unix or Linux. If nothing else, the examples given here are full of good, reusable code to make tasks easier in your day to day functions. Well done.
You can purchase Bash Cookbook from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Not knocking the book, especially as I haven't read it, but I've found the Advanced Bash Scripting Guide (available free online) http://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ extremely helpful on numerous occasions.
Registered Linux User #423733
I may even buy the book based on the review.
Leaving aside stuff like not for the feint of heart, which is just poor editing, what the hell does I found Chapter 11 to be very useful (pun intended) mean?
Maybe it's the ultimate meta-pun, where there was no pun in the first place, but the author pointed out that one was intended, so one was slipstreamed into the statement.
It doesn't matter. If you code like I do you don't need to worry about the difference between /bin/sh and /bin/bash:
<begin file A>
#!/bin/bash
perl <<EOP
print "hello world\n";
EOP
<end file A>
<begin file B>
#!/bin/sh
perl <<EOP
print "hello world\n";
EOP
<end file B>
See? Both work, it's so easy!
As a BSD user (OpenBSD and FreeBSD), the only way I run into bash is to explicitly go and install it. Actually, the only place I have run into bash as a default install is on Linux.
I run into alot more sh, ksh, csh, and tcsh.
Who already own "sed and awk" and buy a book that is supposedly about Bash scripting only to find out that the advanced section replicates what is in the sed and awk book. Which is very annoying.
Not that it's a bad book. I just believe that it should have been more focused on Bash only scripting.
If you want to learn about sed and awk, buy the sed and awk book. If you want to learn Bash scripting, there are a LOT of more useful sites online.
Seriously now, this is like posting a LOTR review by someone who thinks it was written by RJ Tokelen. Or a Star Trek review from a fan of "the late Rod N. Barry".
You gotta love our editors!
Anyway, back to my review of Dark Night... Chris Nolon did it again!
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
True story:
A guy I go to school with (I'm in CS, he's in physics) used to talk about how he was a Bash wizard. Since he was generally talking about writing scripts to submit jobs to a PBS-based cluster, I assumed he meant just in terms of rapidly submitting a large variety of jobs. One day he complains to me that his simulations were slow and wanted me to look at it with him to help him speed them up. So I say fine, send me the file...
He'd written a particle physics Monte Carlo sim using Bash and Linux command line tools (in particular, there were calls to bc everywhere).
In Ubuntu since edgy, sh has been symlinked to dash instead. This allowed for a much faster boot while breaking all the "sh" scripts that used bash-specific syntax.
There was a bunch of whining about it when it happened but I think everyone fixed their scripts and shut up.
I loved Bash (and was the maintained of the FreeBSD port of the Bash tab-completion for a while), but gave it up forever about a week after I tried Zsh. For me, it's like "Bash done right", from associative arrays for easy scripting to tab-completion that's fast and doesn't pollute the namespace with thousands of tiny functions:
Which leads me to ask: has anyone tried Zsh but then gone back to Bash? If so, why?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?