Linux Shell Programming

Course Introduction

• Administration and Course Materials
• Course Structure and Agenda
• Delegate and Trainer Introductions

Session 1: LINUX COMMAND REVIEW

• Basic Linux commands
• General commands
• File and directory handling commands
• Filename generation characters and regular expressions (regex)
• I/O Redirection features
• Other commands

Session 2: GETTING STARTED

• What is a shell script?
• Development guidelines
• Creating and editing shell scripts
• Naming and storing shell scripts
• Executing shell scripts
• Exercise: Write a simple shell script

Session 3: USING VARIABLES

• Environment variables
• Local variables
• Assigning values to variables
• Assessing variable values
• Using quotes
• Delimiting variable names
• Echo control sequences
• Exercise: Add variables to a script

Session 4: INTEGER ARITHMETIC

• Using the expr command
• Using the (( )) notation
• Exercise: Add integer arithmetic to a shell script

Session 5: HANDLING RUN TIME DATA

• The read command
• Command line arguments
• Exercise: Writing a generic shell script
• Exercise: Writing an interactive shell script

Session 6: CONDITIONAL EXECUTION

• The if statement
• The test command
• Exercise: Adding validation to previous scripts

Session 7: ADDITIONAL KORN, BASH & POSIX SYNTAX

• Other test notations
• Default and substitute variables
• Exit status codes
• Exercise

Session 8: LOOP CONSTRUCTS

• The while loop
• The until loop
• The for loop
• The while true and until false loops
• Loop control commands
• Exercise: Enhancing the previously written scripts
• Exercise: Writing a script to copy files using a 'for' loop
• Exercise: Writing a script to generate numbers with the 'while' loop

Session 9: MULTI-BRANCH DECISIONS

• The case statement
• Menu driven applications
• Exercise: Developing and writing a menu system

Session 10: SCRIPTING WITH AWK

• Fundamentals of AWK
• Basic AWK scripts
• AWK within Bash constructs
• Exercise: AWK scripts

Session 11: FUNCTIONS

• What is a function?
• Syntax
• Examples
• Creating a Function Library
• Exercise: Add a function to a script

Session 12: INTERRUPT HANDLING

• Interrupt signals
• Trapping interrupts
• Exercise: Adding traps to the menu script

Appendix A: ADDITIONAL FEATURES AND FACILITIES

• The exec commands
• The includes notation
• More about loops
• Arrays

Appendix B: VIM QUICK REFERENCE

Appendix C: UNIX COMMANDS QUICK REFERENCE

Appendix D: ADDITIONAL EXERCISES