I made the mistake of claiming to be a bit of a whizz with bash. Someone wrote to me and asked me how I did that. The short answer is that I’ve been using it or its predecessors for a very long time. This article is a bit of a meander, but I end by suggesting that In summary you need to understand how to implement sequence, selection, and iteration and how to use getopts and arrays.
I started with csh and then when I worked for Pyramid Technology, I was encouraged to shift to the Bourne shell, and then the Korn shell. I ended up at Sun Microsystems after the launch of Solaris and so the Korn shell remained my scripting language of choice.
At Sun, I missed the opportunity of learning both Perl and Java, although in order to write GUI programmes I picked up TCL/TK and wish . I use TCL/TK so infrequently that I always have a massive start-up cost when I need to write a program in it.
I left Sun in 2009 and while I had limited exposure to Linux during that time I soon made-up for that lack of experience. But bash is not that different from the Bourne or Korn shells, at least not today.
So I have been shell programming for quite a while. Before picking up shell most of my programming had either been in Cobol or SQL. The reason I mentioned this is it the Cobol programmes I wrote were primarily batch programmes and…
