Presented by

Abstract

The POSIX Shell is a really powerful tool. If used properly, it can ease your life considerably. If used improperly it will get in your way.

In this tutorial you will learn when (and when not) to use a shell script to aid your work. We will cover the things that people mostly get wrong (quoting, variable expansion), and best practices for efficient shell scripts (basically, reworking things as a sequence of filters instead of using shell loops).

You will need to bring a laptop running Linux, BSD, or MacOSX, and know how to get a terminal window on your laptop. You should have basic keyboard skills, and know how to use a text editor. We will be using standard tools like grep, sed, ls, echo, etc., to explore what the shell can do and how it works.