[lug] BASH Scripting book recommendations?

Jeffrey S. Haemer jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com
Tue Dec 27 14:02:17 MST 2011


A serious question, for which I can think of two serious answers

(1) Horses for courses

Some problems are better solved in the shell.  "Better" can mean faster to
code, easier to maintain, or more suited to the language in other ways.
 It's the same answer for "Why bother to write in Perl?  Every system I
work on has Java."

(2) Most programming isn't writing code.

Most programming is maintenance -- fixing someone else's code.  (Or your
own that you wrote so long ago that you don't remember why you wrote it
that way.)

Sometimes, especially in a Linux world, that code is in shell scripts.
 Even if your fix is a Perl script, you often have to be able to read, and
sometimes debug, the original code.  If you're facing this, bash is a
different enough language that even knowing a bunch of C or Perl or Python
or Tcl may still leave you at sea.

On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 12:51 PM, Rob Nagler <nagler at bivio.biz> wrote:

> Probably not what you want to hear, but....
>
> #!/usr/bin/<your-favorite-interpreter>
>
> Why bother scripting?  Every system I work on has Perl, Python, Tcl,
> etc.  Sometimes I have to modify shell scripts, but usually that's
> system config so I program the mods in Perl and write tests against
> them.
>
> Happy New Year!
>
> :)
>
> Rob
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-- 
Jeffrey Haemer <jeffrey.haemer at gmail.com>
720-837-8908 [cell], http://seejeffrun.blogspot.com [blog],
http://www.youtube.com/user/goyishekop [vlog]
*פרייהייט? דאס איז יאַנג דינען וואָרט.*
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