Advanced bash scripting 2015

Welcome to the web page for the course "advanced bash scripting".

The lecture notes as well as a list of the material covered can be found at the end of the page. An abstract of the of the course can also be found further down. This course was the first installment of my sequence of courses on UNIX script writing. The subsequent course is the "Introduction to awk programming" course in August 2016.

Update: I taught the course a second time in November 2017, for which I also revised the course material.

Course structure

The course will take place from the 24th to the 28th August 2015 at Heidelberg University . We will meet in the Computer Room U012, which is in the basement of INF 350, Otto-Meyerhof-Zentrum. The course is structured as a full day course running from 9:30am till about 5pm each day (with a one hour lunch break in between).

Abstract

The bash shell is the default shell in almost all major UNIX and LinuX distributions, which makes learning about the bash scripting language pretty much unavoidable if one is working on a UNIX-like operating system. On the other hand this also means that writing bash scripts is conceptually very simple — essentially like typing commands. When it comes to more involved tasks and more powerful scripts, however, some knowledge of the underlying operating system is certainly required. After all bash scripting is all about properly combining the programs available on the UNIX operating system in a clever way.

This idea structures the whole course:

In the first part we will revisit some basic concepts of a UNIX-like operating system and review the set of UNIX coreutils one needs for everyday scripting. Afterwards we will talk about the bash shell and its core language features, including

• control statements (if, for, while, ...)
• file or user input/output
• bash functions
• features simplifying code reuse and script structure

The final part will be concerned with the extraction of information (from files etc.) using so-called regular expressions and programs like awk, sed or grep.

Learning Targets

After the course you will be able to

• apply and utilise the UNIX philosophy in the context of scripting
• identify the structure of a bash script
• enumerate the core concepts of the bash scripting language
• structure a script in a way such that code is reusable in other scripts
• extract information from a file using regular expressions and the standard UNIX tools
• name advantages and disadvantages of tools like awk, sed or grep, cut ..., and give examples for situations in which one is more suitable than the others.

Prerequisites

This course assumes some familiarity with a UNIX-like operating system like GNU/Linux and the bash shell. I.e. you should be able to

• navigate through your files from the terminal.
• create or delete files or folders from the terminal.
• run programs from the terminal (like some "one-liners").
• edit files using a common graphical (or command-line) text editor like gedit, leafpad, vim, nano, ...

Whilst it is not assumed that you have any knowledge of programming or any experience in bash scripting, it is, however, highly recommended that at least either is the case.

Files

Links and references

• bash course files on github
• Introduction to awk programming (Subsequent course with focus on awk)
• The Art of Unix Programming
• GNU bash manual
• GNU sed manual
• GAWK Manual: Effective awk programming
• Advanced bash-scripting guide