November 2003

Book Review: Mastering Shell Scripting

by Ed Schaefer

Read Chapter 1

Wiley Publishing has published Mastering Shell Scripting, by Randal K. Michael, under their Wiley Professional List — Practical and reliable resources for IT professionals. The author, a Unix administrator for Coca-Cola Enterprises, shares his 10 years of varied systems administration and shell scripting experience solving real world problems.

In the book's introduction, Michael states that he intends his book for every Unix professional with access to the command-line — "Programmers, Programmer-Analysts, System Operators, System Administrators, and anyone who is interested in getting ahead in the support arena". But can Randal Michael please everybody?

Reviewing the Basics

Chapter 1 is a "very targeted refresher course" for shell programming. Michael explains the techniques he uses throughout the book. Actually, the topics, commands, and structures presented are a synopsis or an abstract of the entire book. If you like this chapter, you should be interested in the rest of the book.

But serious software developers may take exception with Michael's description of the two methods for declaring a function:

function function_name  # ksh method (comment is mine)
{  
   commands to execute 
}

and 

function_name ()  # POSIX method (comment is mine)
{
   commands to execute
}

He correctly presents the syntax, but does not elaborate on the ksh or POSIX function definitions.