UNIX Shell Programming

Ken Steube
San Diego Supercomputer Center

These are the workshop notes I used to use for teaching a course on Bourne shell (sh) scripting. I haven't taught the class for some time now, but the material is all still current since the Bourne shell hasn't changed. Often you'll find that these notes are a bit short of description. This is because they were intended by be a lecture aid.
What do you need to know to follow this course? These notes were originally written as a second class in UNIX. The first class taught how to use the basic UNIX commands (like sed, grep and find) and this class teaches how to combine these tools to accomplish bigger tasks.
In addition to the material in this course you might be interested in the Korn shell (ksh) and the Bourne again shell (bash), both of which are excellent shells that enchance the original Bourne shell. These alternate shells are upwardly-compatible with the original Bourne shell, meaning that a script written for sh can run in ksh or bash. However, there are additional features in bash and ksh that are not available in the Bourne shell.
The focus of this guide is to get you to understand and run some Bourne shell scripts. On several pages there are example scripts for you to run. On most of these pages there is a link you can click on (with the right mouse button) and download the script to your computer and run it