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. With it, you will be able to create scripts that allow you to accomplish more, in less time, more easily, consistently, and repeatably than ever before.

Anyone? Yes. New users will appreciate the sections on automating repetitive tasks, making simple substitutions, and customizing their environment to be more friendly and perhaps behave in more familiar ways. Power users and administrators will find new and different solutions to common tasks and challenges. Advanced users will have a collection of techniques they can use at a moment’s notice to put out the latest fire, without having to remember every little detail of syntax.

Ideal readers include:

This book will only briefly cover basic and intermediate shell scripting—see Learning the bash Shell by Cameron Newham (O’Reilly) and Classic Shell Scripting by Nelson H.F. Beebe and Arnold Robbins (O’Reilly) for more in-depth coverage. Instead, our goal is to provide solutions to common problems, with a strong focus on the “how to” rather than the theory. We hope this book will save you time when figuring out solutions or trying to remember syntax. In fact, that’s why we wrote this book. It’s one we wanted to read through to get ideas, then refer to practical working examples when needed. That way we don’t have to remember the subtle differences between the shell, Perl, C, and so forth.

This book assumes you have access to a Unix or Linux system (or see Getting bash for Unix and Testing Scripts in VMware) and are familiar with logging in, typing basic commands, and using a text editor. You do not have to be root to use the vast majority of the recipes, though there are a few, particularly dealing with installing bash, where root access will be needed.