Review: Learning the Bash Shell
I’ve been doing a lot of reading!
Though, I have to admit that I haven’t actually read Learning the Bash Shell, I have used it quite a bit in the last week working out my menuing solution. Of course, I know that I can never go too far wrong with an O’Reilly book, but still this one was worth it’s weight in gold this past week.
Okay, so I know I’ve been going on and on about this, but still, it really is a great solution. I had to write a script that was easily updateable, simple for the end user and could be dynamic enough to serve an entire world-wide distribution. I came up with the basic menu and the script to TFTP it over from a remote location with help from Google. But, then we needed to parse an IP address without using anything more than GREP and native tools (i.e. no SED or AWK). How to do it? Pattern matching that I learned from this book. Then, we had to read in the date, without access to the DATE command! How’d I do it? Again, parsing information using pattern matching I learned in the book. Oh, and a bunch of other things, that I also read in this book.
So, in short, though I may not actually read the whole thing through, I will use this sucker as a reference for quite some time.
