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Shell Scripting Primer
Shell scripts are a fundamental part of the Mac OS X programming environment. As a ubiquitous feature of UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems, they represent a way of writing certain types of command-line tools in a way that works on a fairly broad spectrum of computing platforms.
Because shell scripts are written in an interpreted language whose power comes from executing external programs to perform processing tasks, their performance can be somewhat limited. However, because they can execute without any additional effort on nearly any modern operating system, they represent a powerful tool for bootstrapping other technologies. For example, the autoconf tool, used for configuring software prior to compilation, is a series of shell scripts.
You should read this document if you are interested in learning the basics of shell scripting. This document assumes that you already have some basic understanding of at least one procedural programming language such as C. It does not assume that you have very much knowledge of commands executed from the terminal, though, and thus should be readable even if you have never run the Terminal application before.
The techniques in this document are not specific to Mac OS X, although this document does note various quirks of certain command-line utilities in various operating systems. In particular, it includes information about some cases where the Mac OS X versions of command-line utilities behave differently than other commonly available versions such as the GNU equivalents commonly used in Linux and some BSD systems.
This document is not intended to be a complete reference for shell scripting, as such a subject could fill entire libraries. However, it is intended to provide enough information to get you started writing and comprehending shell scripts. Along the way, it provides links to documentation for various additional tools that you may find useful when writing shell scripts.
For your convenience, many of the scripts in this document are also included in the companion files zip archive. You can find this archive in the table of contents when viewing this document in HTML form on the ADC Reference Library website.
Because shell scripts are written in an interpreted language whose power comes from executing external programs to perform processing tasks, their performance can be somewhat limited. However, because they can execute without any additional effort on nearly any modern operating system, they represent a powerful tool for bootstrapping other technologies. For example, the autoconf tool, used for configuring software prior to compilation, is a series of shell scripts.
You should read this document if you are interested in learning the basics of shell scripting. This document assumes that you already have some basic understanding of at least one procedural programming language such as C. It does not assume that you have very much knowledge of commands executed from the terminal, though, and thus should be readable even if you have never run the Terminal application before.
The techniques in this document are not specific to Mac OS X, although this document does note various quirks of certain command-line utilities in various operating systems. In particular, it includes information about some cases where the Mac OS X versions of command-line utilities behave differently than other commonly available versions such as the GNU equivalents commonly used in Linux and some BSD systems.
This document is not intended to be a complete reference for shell scripting, as such a subject could fill entire libraries. However, it is intended to provide enough information to get you started writing and comprehending shell scripts. Along the way, it provides links to documentation for various additional tools that you may find useful when writing shell scripts.
For your convenience, many of the scripts in this document are also included in the companion files zip archive. You can find this archive in the table of contents when viewing this document in HTML form on the ADC Reference Library website.
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