10. Organization of this document

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 basics: why Bash is so good, building blocks, first guidelines on developing good scripts.

• Chapter 2: Script basics: writing and debugging.

• Chapter 3: The Bash Environment: initialization files, variables, quoting characters, shell expansion order, aliases, options.

• Chapter 4: Regular expressions: an introduction.

• Chapter 5: Sed: an introduction to the sed line editor.

• Chapter 6:Awk: introduction to the awk programming language.

• Chapter 7: Conditional statements: constructs used in Bash to test conditions.

• Chapter 8: Interactive scripts: making scripts user-friendly, catching user input.

• Chapter 9: Executing commands repetitively: constructs used in Bash to automate command execution.

• Chapter 10: Advanced variables: specifying variable types, introduction to arrays of variables, operations on variables.

• Chapter 11: Functions: an introduction.

• Chapter 12: Catching signals: introduction to process signalling, trapping user-sent signals.