UNIX Shell Programming

Course Contents - DAY 1

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

• Basic Unix commands
• General commands
• File and directory handling commands
• Filename generation and regular expressions characters
• I/O Redirection features
• Other commands

• 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

• 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

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

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

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

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

Course Contents - DAY 2

• 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

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

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

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

• The exec commands
• The includes notation
• More about loops
• Arrays
• Here Documents
• Exercise: Create a here script