Linux Advanced Shell Programming Tools

Course Introduction

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

Session 1: BACKUP AND RESTORE UTILITIES

• Backing-up and restoring files
• Basic and advanced use of tar
• Compression utilities gzip, bzip2, zip and compress
• Exercise: Backing up and restoring files using tar
• Exercises: Compressing files

Session 2: BACKGROUND JOB SCHEDULING

• Scheduling jobs with the cron command
• Scheduling jobs with the at command
• Exercises: Running background jobs

Session 3: COMMANDS FOR COMPARING FILES

• Compare files with the cmp command
• Compare and format files with pr
• Compare files with the comm command
• Compare files with the diff and sdiff commands
• Compare large files with the bdiff command
• Exercises: Identifying file differences

Session 4: SPLITTING FILES

• The fold command
• Split files using context and content rules
• Exercises: Splitting files

Session 5: IDENTIFYING AND TRANSLATING CHARACTERS

• od - octal dump
• Use cat to display non-printing characters
• View and format files with nl
• The expand and unexpand commands to convert between tab and space characters
• The tr command for character translation
• Exercises: Translating characters with tr

Session 6: REGULAR EXPRESSION NOTATION REVIEW

• Standard regular expressions
• Searching with grep
• Metacharacters, positional characters and quantifiers
• Extended regular expressions
• POSIX character classes
• PERL expressions

Session 7: THE STREAM EDITOR sed

• sed command line syntax
• sed script files
• sed command processing
• sed addresses and simple instructions
• sed pattern space and hold space
• Grouping sed commands
• Hold and get functions
• Advanced flow control
• Write output to temporary files
• Exercises: Text processing with sed

Session 8: FUNDAMENTALS OF AWK

• Basic AWK usage
• AWK program-files
• AWK scripts
• AWK variables
• Pattern matching with AWK
• AWK extended patterns

Session 9: AWK OPERATORS

• AWK AND, OR and range operators
• AWK arithmetic operations
• AWK output
• Formatting output with printf
• Exercises: Create awk scripts to extract selected data from a file and generate reports

Session 10: AWK PROGRAM CONTROL STRUCTURES

• The BEGIN and END functions
• The AWK if construct
• The AWK else if construct
• The AWK while construct
• Other program control statements
• The AWK break, continue and exit statements
• User defined functions
• Exercises: Create AWK scripts and program-files utilising program control structures

Session 11: AWK FUNCTIONS

• AWK string functions
• AWK length, tolower, toupper, index, sub, gsub, match, substr, split, sprintf, system and getline functions
• Exercises: Generate AWK scripts and program-files to extract and format data using AWK functions

Session 12: AWK ARRAYS

• AWK associative arrays
• Multi-dimensional arrays
• Exercises: Create AWK associative arrays to process text files and generate reports

Session 13: MISCELLANEOUS TOOLS

• bc (calculator)
• fuser (testing for files in use)
• getops (checking options passed to shell scripts)
• printf (formatting screen output)
• logger (script logging)
• xargs (generating arguments for a command)
• eval (re-evaluating variables)
• Exercises: Using tools within a shell script