Overview of the UNIX Shell

• History of the UNIX Shell. UNIX fork/exec system calls.
• Arguments and environment of a UNIX program.
• How the Shell reads the command line.
• Differences between Bourne, Korn and Bourne Again Shells.

Interfacing UNIX with the interactive Shell

• Starting an interactive Shell. Initialization of the Shell.
• Line editing, vi and emacs Ksh modes. Line editing with Bash.
• Name completion. Shell options and the set built-in.
• Customizing the environment. The command search path.
• Shell commands and scripts.
• Sourcing Shell commands. Execution of a Shell script. UNIX execution of a Shell script, the she-bang.
• Creation and use of Shell variables. Passing arguments to a Shell script.
• Differences between exec, background and sub-shells. Using pipelines and lists.

An introduction to Shell scripting

• Basic Shell programming.
• Shell variables and compound variables. Strings operators.
• Command substitution, braces expansion, tilde substitution.
• Initialization of a script, positional parameters, shift and parameters substitution.
• Flow Control.
• If/else, for, case, select, while and until. Functions. The set and eval built-ins.

Advanced Shell programming and the Korn Shell

• Typed variables. Arrays, indexed and associative arrays. Typeset, indirect variable references.
• Input/Output. I/O redirections, the IFS. Reading from the standard input.
• Process handling. Job control signals and traps. Co-routines and co-process substitution de process.
• Optimization of the Korn Shell. Function libraries. Development of new Shell built-in
• Korn Shell debugging. Special debug traps. Using setters and getters.

Other UNIX powerful scripting tools

• Frequently used tools associated with the Shell.
• Shar, stty, lockfile, tput, grep, find, cut, sort and xargs AST tree walk and coshell. UNIX regular expressions.
• Analysing text with SED. The command line. Scripting with sed.
• Overview of the AWK interpreter. Internal variables.
• Text and database processing.