Introduction to Unix/Linux and Shell Programming

This course is applicable to the Bourne shell and it's derivatives (e.g. the Korn shell and 'bash') on any Unix or Linux variant. Participants will gain an understanding of the the major concepts of Unix/Linux operation.

Effective use of shell scripts allow users and administrators to automate many complex tasks in Unix. In addition, the 'sed' and 'awk' programs enable powerful text processing scripts to be written. This course provides an in-depth coverage of scripting for all three programs.

Outline

Getting Started
■The evolution of Unix and Linux
■Logging in and out
■Basic commands

The File System
■File system structure
■Navigation
■File and directory operations
■Hard and symbolic links

Shell Basics
■Common shells
■Command syntax
■Shell meta-characters
■Quoting
■I/O re-direction
■Pipes
■Executing multiple commands
Processes
■Programs and processes
■Running commands in the background
■Listing and controlling processes
■Signals

Security
■Users and groups
■File and process ownership
■File permissions

The 'vi' Text Editor
■Modes of operation
■Simple editing commands
■Regular expressions
■Powerful search and replace techniques

Unix Power Tools
■Finding files (find)
■Searching for text (grep)
■Replacing text (tr)
■Sorting text (sort)
■Comparing files (diff, cmp)
■Communications (mail, write)

Shell Data
■Shell variables
■Pre-defined shell variables
■Positional parameters
■Exporting variables
■Startup files
■Evaluating numeric expressions

Shell Control Structures
■Truth and falsehood
■The 'test' statement
■The 'if' statements
■The 'case' statement
■Pattern matching
■The 'for' loop
■Tracing and debugging scripts

Shell Process Control
■The 'exit' statement
■Writing handlers for signals
■Reading user input
■Using file descriptors

Sed
■Using sed in pipelines
■Sed script files
■Addressing in sed
■Using sed buffers

Awk
■Basic awk processing
■Pre-defined variables
■User-defined variables
■Operators
■Conditional and looping constructs