Basics of Shell Scripting
Basic Rules of shell scripting:
A shell programming language is a powerful and complete programming
language
A shell script is an ASCII text file containing commands to be executed in
sequence
To allow this the following permissions need to be set on the file
“r” (readable) and “x” (executable) for the user running it
These permissions are not granted by default on a newly created file but you can
do it with the following command
chmod +x script.sh
You can also run the script without setting the permissions using sh or bash
/bin/sh is a symbolic link to /bin/bash
Example: sh script.sh or bash script.sh
The script directory must be in the user's search path
Otherwise must be started using full path names
A good way to do this is to create a /bin directory in the users home
directory and add it to the users PATH
Do this in the ~.bashrc
Example: export PATH=$PATH:~/bin
Always give script files a .sh extension so you know that it is a shell script (Not
required)
Using of Basic script elements:
Start with a script that simply outputs the mailbox file to the terminal
#!/bin/bash
#basic_script1.sh
cat /var/spool/mail/geeko
The first line tells Linux kernel to pass this file to the bash shell to be executed
The second line is a comment since it starts with #
The last line uses the cat command to open the mailbox file and print it to the
terminal
Another improvement would be to add a start message to the script
#!/bin/bash
#basic_script3.sh
echo -e “Welcome to the Request tracker. \nThe following are open requests:\n”
cat /var/spool/mail/geeko | grep '#'
The echo command is used to output text, which is enclosed in double quotes, to
the terminal
The option -e lets echo interpret backslash sequences
The sequence \n is used to creates a line break (new-line) in the output
Backslash sequences that can be used with echo
\\ - Outputs a backslash
\a - Outputs an alert (beep tone)
\b - Outputs a backspace
\n - Outputs a new-line
\t - Outputs a horizontal tab
\v - Outputs a vertical tab
Variables and Command Substitution:
Variables:
The string “geeko” is assigned to the variable a which is then used in the echo
command
The important things are
When you assign a variable just use the name of the variable
When you access the data of a variable use the $ before the variable
name
When you assign data to a variable there can be no spaces between the
variable name, the = and the data
The output would look like this
geeko@linux-rwke:~/Shell_Scripting> ./variables_1.sh
Hello, my name is Geeko
Variables can contain strings and numbers as well
By default a variable can hold any kind of data but it is possible to limit a variable
to a specific type using the declare command
It is also possible to assign the output of a command to a variable or to use a
command directly where the output is needed
Called a command substitution
Command Substitution:
Means that the output of a command is used in a shell command line or a shell
script
Example that uses the output of the command date to generate the output of
the current date
#!/bin/bash
#command_subs_1.sh
echo “Today is `date +%m/%d/%y`”
Instead of printing the output of a command to the screen with echo, it can also
be assigned to a variable
#!/bin/bash
#command_subs_2.sh
TODAY=`date +%m/%d/%y`
echo “Today is $TODAY”
The output of date is assigned to the variable TODAY which is then printed to the
screen with echo.
Useful commands in shell scripting:
Introduction:
This objective gives an overview of useful commands that can be used in shell
scripts and is intended as a reference
Use the cat command
Use the cut command
Use the date command
Use the grep and egrep command
Use the sed command
Use the test command
The cat Command
When combined with the here operator (<<) a good choice to output several
lines of text from a script
Interactively, it is mostly run with a filename as an argument and prints to
standard output
The cut Command
Use this command to cut out sections of lines from a file so only the specified
section is printed on standard output
Can specify single or several sections
The command is applied to each line of text as available in a file or on standard
output
Use cut -f to cut out text fields
Use cut -c to work with specified characters
Use cut -d to specify a field separator
A tab is the default
The cut Command
Example to cut and print the first field to standard output
cut -d : -f1 /etc/passwd
root
bin
daemon
..
Example to take the output of ls and cut out everything from the thirty-fifth
character, pipe it to sort and have is sorted by file size
ls -l somedir/ | cut -c 35- | sort -n
The date Command
Use whenever have a need to obtain a date or time string
Output with no options
date
Fri Sep 03 14:18:12 CEST 2014
The output can be formatted using options
The -I option prints the date and time in ISO format
Same as +%Y-%m-%d
The grep and egrep Commands
Used to search one or multiple files for certain patterns
The syntax is grep searchpattern filename ...
The output is all lines that contain the pattern
Many options are available to do things like
Only print the line numbers
Print the line along with leading and trailing context lines
Search patterns can be supplied as regular expressions
The regular grep has limited capabilities
Can use egrep or grep -E for more complex patterns
The regular expressions are in the standard regex syntax
To avoid having special characters in the seach patterns interpreted by the shell
enclose the pattern in quotation marks
tux@DA1:~> egrep (b|B)lurb file*
bash: syntax error near unexpected token |
tux@DA1:~> egrep “(b|B)lurb” file*
file1:blurb
file2:Blurb
The sed Command
The sed program is a stream editor used from the command line, not
interactively
Does text transformations on a line-by-line basis
Can specify sed commands directly on the command line or in a special
command script loaded by the program
The syntax is sed editing-command filename
The available editing commands are single-character arguments such as
d: Delete
s: Substitute (replace)
p: Output line
a: Append after
The output normally goes to standard output and can also be redirected to a file
Each sed command must be preceded by an exact address or address range
specifying the lines to which the editing command applies
Options can be specified to influence the overall behavior of the program
-f filename
Can specify a script file from which to read its editing commands
Sometimes need to specify exact line or lines to be processed and there are
special characters you can use
$ stands for the last line
Command to print only lines 1 through 9
sed -n '1,9p' somefile
The test Command
Exists as both a built-in command and as an external command
Used to compare values and to check for file and their properties, such as if it
exists, is executable, etc.
If the tested condition is true then test returns an exit status of 0 and if not true
returns an exit status of 1
In shell scripts mainly used to declare conditions to influence the operation of
loops, branches and other statements
The test syntax is test condition
Test whether a file exists
-e File exists
-f File exists and is a regular file
-d File exists and is a directory
-x File exists and is an executable file
Compare 2 files
-nt Newer than
-ot Older than
-ef Refers to same inode (hard link)
Compare 2 integers
-eq Equal
-ne Not equal
-gt Greater than
-lt Less than
-ge Greater than or equal
-le Less than or equal
Test strings
test -z string True if string has 0 length
test string True if string has nonzero length
test string1 = string2 True if strings are equal
test string1 != string2 True if strings are not equal
Combine tests
test ! condition - True if condition is not true
test condition1 -a condition2 - True if both are true
test condition1 -o condition2 - True if either is true
