Bash Reference Manual

by Chet Ramey, Brian Fox

Bash is one of the most popular "shell," or command language interpreters, used with the Unix operating system. Bash is an sh-compatible shell that incorporates useful features from the Korn shell ksh and the C shell csh. It is intended to be a conformant implementation of the IEEE POSIX Shell and Tools specification (IEEE Working Group 1003.2). It offers functional improvements over sh for both interactive and programming use. What's more Bash is portable; it currently runs on nearly every version of Unix and a few other operating systems--independently supported ports exist for MS-DOS, OS/2, Windows 95, and Windows NT. iUniverse.com Computer Books are composed of freely available online computer manuals, industry standard specifications, and electronically distributed computer-programming guides. They include open documents collections of industry specifications and standards and a collection of the best open source documentation on the Web...the most complete open source library available anywhere. Each book contains the complete, unabridged text of the original document. Our on-demand publishing process gives you the actual text of the online document in a convenient, inexpensive, easy-to-use format. And remember...iUniverse.com donates a portion of the profits from open document and open source books to support the mission of the free software community.

160 pages, Paperback

Published October 1, 2000

Reviews

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

This manual is a mixed bag. The overview sections can be very helpful. Chapter 3 ("Basic Shell Features") is incredibly useful for anyone who's ever struggled to debug a shell script. And the sections describing features (chapter 6) and job control (chapter 7) give good overviews. But the reference section on built-in commands, shell options, variables, etc. are pretty weak. It's frustrating to see documentation for complex options that don't even suggest how one would actually use it, let alone provide an example. I read this to gain a better intuitive understanding of the shell but I don't feel like I got that (though I already started off fairly comfortable with it).