This tutorial is written to help people understand some of the basics of shell script programming (aka shell scripting), and hopefully to introduce some of the possibilities of simple but powerful …

For our first shell script, we'll just write a script which says "Hello World". We will then try to get more out of a Hello World program than any other tutorial you've ever read :-)

When you call myvar2.sh from your interactive shell, a new shell is spawned to run the script. This is partly because of the #!/bin/sh line at the start of the script, which we discussed earlier.

One often-overlooked feature of Bourne shell script programming is that you can easily write functions for use within your script. This is generally done in one of two ways; with a simple …

This tutorial is more of a general introduction to Shell Scripting, the longer Shell Scripting: Expert Recipes for Linux, Bash and more book covers every aspect of Bash in detail.

The first half covers all of the features of the shell in every detail; the second half has real-world shell scripts, organised by topic, along with detailed discussion of each script.

The first half covers all of the features of the shell in every detail; the second half has real-world shell scripts, organised by topic, along with detailed discussion of each script.

Note that -a, -e (both meaning "file exists"), -S (file is a Socket), -nt (file is newer than), -ot (file is older than), -ef (paths refer to the same file) and -O (file is owned by the user running the test) …

The first half covers all of the features of the shell in every detail; the second half has real-world shell scripts, organised by topic, along with detailed discussion of each script.

These can be used within a shell script to change the flow of execution depending on the success or failure of commands executed. This was briefly introduced in Variables - Part II. Here we …