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Bash Cookbook

Posted by samzenpus on Wed Aug 13, 2008 12:59 PM
from the read-all-about-it dept.
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.
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.
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  • BASH != Bourne Shell (Score:5, Informative)

    by llamalad (12917) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:02PM (#24587003)

    'sh' is the Bourne shell.
    'bash' is the Bourne Again SHell.

    They're not the same.

  • by Tetsujin (103070) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:03PM (#24587033) Homepage Journal

    So, what, does this refer to people who act like they're going to rip your heart out of your chest, only it all turns out to be a ruse so they can kick you in the balls?

  • Bourne-Again Shell (Score:5, Informative)

    by cos(0) (455098) <pmw+slashdot@qnan.org> on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:03PM (#24587037) Homepage

    Bourne Again Shell [gnu.org], not Borne.

    • Re:Bourne-Again Shell by Kingrames (Score:1) Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:11PM
    • by Ecuador (740021) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:26PM (#24587479) Homepage

      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!

    • Re:Bourne-Again Shell by Comboman (Score:2) Wednesday August 13 2008, @02:17PM
    • by MarkusQ (450076) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @03:09PM (#24589151) Journal

      And it's "faint of heart" not "feint of heart".

      And it would be "overviewing basic concepts" not "over viewing basic concepts" if "overview" were a verb.

      I made it as far as:

      I found Chapter 11 to be very useful (pun intended)

      before threwing in the trowl.

      --MarkusQ

    • Re:Bourne-Again Shell by vrmlguy (Score:2) Wednesday August 13 2008, @04:40PM
  • by UltraMathMan (1139987) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:04PM (#24587055)
    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/ [tldp.org] extremely helpful on numerous occasions.
  • by -homb- (82455) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:04PM (#24587059)

    It's not " Borne Again Shell", but "BOURNE Again Shell".
    Stephen Bourne created sh from which bash is derived.

  • by Z00L00K (682162) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:06PM (#24587073) Homepage


    :

    echo "I'm an old Bourne Shell"
    echo "Early on the first line was a colon to indicate a bourne shell"
    echo "And that was before the convention of #!/bin/sh"

  • by gardyloo (512791) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:06PM (#24587077)

    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.

  • Unix you say.. (Score:5, Informative)

    by The Moof (859402) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:08PM (#24587113)
    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.
  • by mea37 (1201159) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:10PM (#24587131)

    Well, ok... Cookbook sucks!

    Oh, did I parse that wrong?

  • Largest BASH script? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:15PM (#24587245)

    I wonder what is the largest BASH script ever made?

    7000 lines of BASH code:
    http://ra.vendomar.ee/~ivo/finstall [vendomar.ee]

  • by Ex-Linux-Fanboy (1311235) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:16PM (#24587287) Homepage Journal
    Bash has been my favorite interactive shell for 12 years now. Basically, *NIX command shells, which in the 1980s had a lot of interesting ideas presented (csh, tcsh, ksh, etc.), have basically settled down. The only shells I have seen in use on modern *NIX systems (read Linux and the odd BSD) is Bash and Ash. Ash has had a resurgence in popularity lately because a version of it is part of Busybox (along with a tiny implementation of awk).

    Bash takes Bourne Shell scripting (which was always more powerful than Csh scripting), and combines it with Csh's and Tcsh's best interactive features (! expansion, arrow history, tab completion, etc.).

    The last time I saw people try to have a different paradigm with *NIX shells was with the 'rc' and 'es' shells of the 1990s, which was an attempt to introduce functional programming to the shell. Both shells stopped being actively developed before they were full featured (they never had job control, for example).

    More recently, there is a new shell out there called the 'fish' shell, which I tried and didn't like. I don't like its requirement to have everything in a bunch of colors; a true *NIX shell, in my opinion, should not try and make everything colorful (I also despise ls with colors).

    Looks like ksh finally was open sourced, but by then Bash had become the standard shell you're guaranteed to have in just about any Linux distribution (exceptions being tiny distributions which use Busybox for everything).

    More information, of course, is on the Wikipedia. [wikipedia.org].

  • by john_anderson_ii (786633) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:18PM (#24587321)
    Bash is just plain awesome, I'm always trying to find ways to push it even further, I'm checking to see if this book is on safari right now.

    I do a lot of work in bash. I'm a Linux administrator by trade, so I think in bash all day long. For my company I've developed a set of bash libraries that we call the BPE. These libraries implement a hashmap, stack, linked list, MySQL API, SQLite API and all sorts of other useful things that one doesn't want to re-invent for every script. I'm in the process of writing man pages for the several libraries right now, and I think I'll sourceforge the project when the mans are complete. It's great to be able to begin a new script when a hashmap might be useful, and be able to do something like:

    $USE_BPE
    use "hashmap"

    hm_create "myMap"
    hm_set "myMap" "key" "value"
    value="$(hm_lookup "myMap" "key")"
    echo "$value"

    In short, if organized correctly, bash can be used where a senior sysadmin would normally reach for perl or python. This is often helpful when your juniors have a good grasp of bash, but aren't very strong in other languages.
  • by al0ha (1262684) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:25PM (#24587451) Journal
    Bash is cool and I suppose this book is decent, though I've found UNIX for Programmers and Users to be the most useful as it covers Bash, SH and KSH. KSH rocks!
  • by Animats (122034) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:26PM (#24587475) Homepage

    598 pages for a book on a shell? Oink!

    A little plastic cheat sheet would be far more useful. The important thing is to get the basic ideas and the syntax. That requires a small, tightly written book. In an oinker of a book, the concepts get lost in the verbiage.

  • by ylikone (589264) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:30PM (#24587549) Homepage
    This book covers the GNU Bourne Again Shell, which is a member of the Bourne family of shells that includes the original Bourne shell sh, the Korn shell ksh, and the Public Domain Korn Shell pdksh. This book is for anyone who uses a Unix or Linux system, as well as system administrators who may use several systems on any given day. Thus, there are solutions and useful sections for all levels of users including newcomers. This book is full of recipes for creating scripts and interacting with the shell that will allow you to greatly increase your productivity.

    Chapter 1, "Beginning bash" covers what a shell is, why you should care about it, and then the basics of bash including how you get it on your system. The next five chapters are on the basics that you would need when working with any shell - standard I/O, command execution, shell variables, and shell logic and arithmetic. Next there are two chapters on "Intermediate Shell Tools". These chapters' recipes use some utilities that are not part of the shell, but which are so useful that it is hard to imagine using the shell without them, such as "sort" and "grep", for example. Chapter nine features recipes that allow you to find files by case, date, type, size, etc. Chapter 10, "Additional Features for Scripting" has much to do with code reuse, which is something you find even in scripting. Chapter 11, "Working with Dates and Times", seems like it would be very simple, but it's not. This chapter helps you get through the complexities of dealing with different formats for displaying the time and date and converting between various date formats.

    Chapter 12, "End-User Tasks As Shell Scripts", shows you a few larger though not large examples of scripts. They are meant to give you useful, real world examples of actual uses of shell scripts beyond just system administration tasks. Chapter 13, "Parsing and Similar Tasks", is about tasks that will be familiar to programmers. It's not necessarily full of more advanced scripts than the other recipes in the book, but if you are not a programmer, these tasks might seem obscure or irrelevant to your use of bash. Topics covered include parsing HTML, setting up a database with MySQL, and both trimming and compressing whitespace. Chapter 14 is on dealing with the security of your shell scripts. Chapters 15 through 19 finish up the book starting with a chapter on advanced scripting that focuses on script portability. Chapter 16 is related to the previous chapter on portability and is concerned with configuring and customizing your bash environment. Chapter 17 is about miscellaneous items that didn't fit well into any other chapter. The subjects include capturing file metadata for recovery, sharing and logging sessions, and unzipping many ZIP files at once. Chapter 18 deals with shortcuts aimed at the limiting factor of many uses of bash - the typing speed of the user and shortcuts that cut down on the amount of typing necessary. The final chapter in the book, "Tips and Traps", deals with the common mistakes that bash users make.

    All in all this is a very handy reference for a vast number of the tasks that you'll come across when scripting with the bash shell along with well-commented code. Highly recommended.

  • Obligatory. (Score:4, Funny)

    by pushing-robot (1037830) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:32PM (#24587585)
    • Re:Obligatory. by grub (Score:1) Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:52PM
    • Re:Obligatory. by Yokaze (Score:2) Wednesday August 13 2008, @02:39PM
    • 1 reply beneath your current threshold.
  • Holding Out (Score:3, Funny)

    by Jah-Wren Ryel (80510) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:34PM (#24587643)

    I'm still waiting for jbosh, the Jason BOurne SHell, to be released. I hear it can really kick some ass.

  • by lelitsch (31136) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:38PM (#24587695)

    Anyone who has used a derivative of Unix over the past 20 years has used Bash

    Wow, we could have avoided the entire SCO since AIX is not a derivative of UNIX.

  • by AP31R0N (723649) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:49PM (#24587857)

    It's a cookbook!!!

  • by plasticsquirrel (637166) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @01:55PM (#24587953)

    To truly master a Unix environment, you need to know a shell, and Bash is easily the most popular of them.

    Bash is a fine shell, but it's certainly not the standard on Unixen today. Most versions of Unix still have the Korn/Posix Shell as the most common shell. This is certainly true in Solaris, HP-UX, and AIX. The BSD's typically don't use Bash, and favor more traditional, light-weight shells. However, some versions may package Bash in their distributions.

    Bash is really only the common default shell on Linux, from what I have seen. Things learned for Bash have similar syntax in other shells, but teaching newbies that Bash is the standard shell is a very bad, Linux-centric idea that leads to Bash-isms (people trying to use Bash-specific features in other shells).

  • by InterGuru (50986) <jhdNO@SPAMinterguru.com> on Wednesday August 13 2008, @02:17PM (#24588313) Homepage

    They can just enter "man bash" on the command line

  • by UnknownSoldier (67820) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @02:22PM (#24588409)

    I still miss the directory history (Ctrl-PageUp/Dn) from 4NT. I see one person does too and came up with solution [linuxgazette.net]

  • by Joe Snipe (224958) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @02:26PM (#24588495) Homepage Journal
    If you are new to linux and are thinking about learning BASH, you need to be aware that in Ubuntu linux /bin/sh points to DASH, NOT BASH. Not alot of difference, but it can screw you up if you are not aware of it. You know I'm not trying to troll here, but I really felt this change was poorly implemented and announced. I hope it doesn't deter any newbies from probing deeper into their systems and learning the joys of scripting.
  • by HighOrbit (631451) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @02:43PM (#24588791)
    The review says, "They also use the POSIX standard, so that all of the examples are portable across platforms."

    So if the book and examples limit themselves to the POSIX subset of bash's capabilities and don't go into the GNU extensions, is the book really about "bash"? It sounds like the book could be called "UNIX shell cookbook" (oops already done) or "Ksh Cookbook" just as much as "Bash Cookbook". But of course, bash is the Linux default and Linux is hot while Unix is passe.

    I always thought it was the gnu extensions above and beyond POSIX (while staying backwards capatable with POSIX) that make the gnu tools like bash and gawk so much (allegedly) better than ksh and awk.

    BTW, I use bash because it is the default on most linux systems so I am familiar with it. Bash is the very first thing I install on BSD or Solaris systems and then I set it as my login shell. It's actually really rare that I need to call on the gnu extensions, so I could probably be happy with pdksh just as well.
  • by Just Some Guy (3352) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Wednesday August 13 2008, @03:11PM (#24589181) Homepage Journal

    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 [zsh.org]. 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:

    $ zsh
    $ set | wc -l
    167
    $ bash
    $ set | wc -l
    7221

    Which leads me to ask: has anyone tried Zsh but then gone back to Bash? If so, why?

    • Re:Not the only choice by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Wednesday August 13 2008, @04:02PM
    • Re:Not the only choice by nostrad (Score:1) Wednesday August 13 2008, @04:31PM
      • by Just Some Guy (3352) <kirk+slashdot@strauser.com> on Wednesday August 13 2008, @04:51PM (#24590817) Homepage Journal

        Coloring the prompt? That was the "gee whiz!" moment that made me switch permanently. From my .zshrc:

        # Import color definitions
        autoload colors zsh/terminfo
        colors

        # Define common and useful things to put in a prompt
        typeset -A prc
        prc[abbrevpath]='%{${fg[red]}%}%B%45<...<%~%<<%b%{${fg[default]}%}'
        prc[newline]=$'\n'
        prc[promptchar]='%(!.#.$)'
        prc[smiley]='%(?.%{${fg[green]}%}:).%{${fg[red]}%}:()%{${fg[default]}%}'
        prc[timestamp]='%B%{${fg[blue]}%}[%T]%{${fg[default]}%}%b'
        prc[userspec]='%B%(!.%{${fg[red]}%}.%{${fg[green]}%})%n@%m%{${fg[default]}%}%b'

        # Make a spiffy prompt
        PROMPT="${prc[userspec]} ${prc[timestamp]} ${prc[abbrevpath]}${prc[newline]}${prc[smiley]} ${prc[promptchar]} "

        # Unclutter the namespace
        unset prc

        See how all the colors are defined in an associative array, like ${fg[green]} gets you a green foreground? Say I'm in the directory "/usr/share/media/music/albums/Pink Floyd - A Momentary Lapse of Reason". As a regular user, my prompt looks like:

        kirk@athena [16:40] ...s/Pink Floyd - A Momentary Lapse of Reason
        :) $

        My name@host is green, the time is blue, and the path is red. The smiley face is green. Now, if I'm root:

        $ sudo -s
        root@athena [16:43] ...s/Pink Floyd - A Momentary Lapse of Reason
        :) #

        My name@host is red now, and the prompt char is "#" instead of "$". But what if I run a command and it fails?

        # crqecrqw
        zsh: command not found: crqecrqw
        root@athena [16:44] ...s/Pink Floyd - A Momentary Lapse of Reason
        :( #

        The green smiley face is now a red frowney face. Someone suggested a "big" prompt like that, and once I got used to it, I love it. It's very easy to see where command output stops and the next command starts, and the whole green smile vs. red frown thing is an instant visual indicator of a command's results (which sometimes isn't obvious, say if you're redirecting stderr to /dev/null). Sure, I could have done something similar in Bash, but I guarantee it would've been a whole lot less readable. I did that as an experiment to learn Zsh scripting, and I haven't deliberately used Bash since then.

    • Re:Not the only choice by Sosarian (Score:2) Wednesday August 13 2008, @07:14PM
    • Re:Not the only choice by Wdomburg (Score:2) Thursday August 14 2008, @09:46AM
    • Re:Not the only choice by neurovish (Score:1) Thursday August 14 2008, @11:09AM
    • Re:Not the only choice by bonkeroo buzzeye (Score:1) Thursday August 14 2008, @02:37PM
  • by otis wildflower (4889) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @03:20PM (#24589329) Homepage

    ... Starring Matt Damon.

    TIA.

  • by otopico (32364) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @04:27PM (#24590431)

    tcsh and Pico! partners in crime and the only thing you will ever need... aside from root.

    if it isnt tcsh, it's crap.

    (also elm ftw!)

  • Without question Ken O. Burtch's book "Linux Shell Scripting with Bash"

    Its extremely practical, very well organized, and covers just the right amount of related packages and use cases.

    On top of all that, its actually readable.

  • by Macka (9388) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @04:44PM (#24590727)

    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.

    Well I've not read the book, so I'm not sure what context he's using awk and sed in, but he should not be advocating the use these two unless it's absolutely necessary and only for occasional use. Under no circumstances should you ever make heavy use of them, especially when if you find yourself invoking them thousands of times inside a loop. The context switching it creates is a performance killer.

    There really is no need for it, as bash has a very powerful set of features for text manipulation that can be bent to almost any task. It may require writing a little more code to get the job done, but sticking with shell built-ins as much as possible to avoid context switching will result in much much faster execution times. The same goes for other shells too, like ksh, zsh, etc.

    I've re-written scripts for customers in the past to eliminate external programs as much as possible and reduced run times (for example) from several hours, to just 20 minutes.
     

  • This guide ... (Score:2, Informative)

    by actionbastard (1206160) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @07:59PM (#24592953)
    by Mendel Cooper, is all you will need. PDF [riverusers.com]. tar.bz [riverusers.com].

    Save your money for beer.
  • by dindi (78034) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @09:33PM (#24593819) Homepage

    I have seen bash gurus who could cat a file into sed, then run a regexp then count the output lines...

    Also many of these gurus could not check if a file existed, write a normal "if" comparing 2 variables, or write a script that w.g. found files at a place, ran grep on them, then depending on the output replaced strings in them, and created a diff directory.

    Now these books are NOT JUST for these guys, and I am sure even if you are that 3133t hax0r bash guru you can still find something new in these books.

    I am using bash since 92 (I know some since the 70's), and learn something new every week (at least) about bash or some pretty common UNIX command (grep, sed, bash sort, tar)......

    I am programming PHP and ASP (most of the time) and do it on Mac/OSX machines, so even working on Wintel machines I still have the edge using my unix cli (just mount the SMB sucker, then run the good stuff).......

    Then again, just my 2c, I just thought there were lot of bad critics here, and I though any book was a source for learning new. Or hey, just use google and "man", "man" (info) is your best friend under *NIX.....

    • Re:Bash gurus by Anonymous Coward (Score:1) Thursday August 14 2008, @07:35AM
      • Re:Bash gurus by dindi (Score:2) Thursday August 14 2008, @06:03PM
  • Weakest. Pun. Ever. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Wowlapalooza (1339989) on Wednesday August 13 2008, @09:34PM (#24593829)

    I found Chapter 11 to be very useful (pun intended) finally grasping some concepts on the find command that have previously escaped me

    I think the Chapter 11 = bankruptcy folks have it completely right; the reviewer's attempt at humor was completely bankrupt here.

  • by johndmartiniii (1213700) on Thursday August 14 2008, @12:12AM (#24595053) Homepage
    Did you mean "faint-of-heart?"
  • by crawly (890914) on Thursday August 14 2008, @04:24AM (#24596413)
    Sorry but i use CLISP for my shell.
  • by Cartan (452962) on Saturday August 16 2008, @06:08PM (#24630023) Homepage

    You, Sir, are an asshole ;-)

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