Part 4. Advanced Topics

At this point, we are ready to delve into certain of the difficult and unusual aspects of scripting. Along the way, we will attempt to "push the envelope" in various ways and examine boundary conditions (what happens when we move into uncharted territory?).

Table of Contents

19. Regular Expressions

19.1. A Brief Introduction to Regular Expressions

19.2. Globbing

20. Subshells

21. Restricted Shells

22. Process Substitution

23. Functions

23.1. Complex Functions and Function Complexities

23.2. Local Variables

23.3. Recursion Without Local Variables

24. Aliases

25. List Constructs

26. Arrays

27. /dev and /proc

27.1. /dev

27.2. /proc

28. Of Zeros and Nulls

29. Debugging

30. Options

31. Gotchas

32. Scripting With Style

32.1. Unofficial Shell Scripting Stylesheet

33. Miscellany

33.1. Interactive and non-interactive shells and scripts

33.2. Shell Wrappers

33.3. Tests and Comparisons: Alternatives

33.4. Recursion

33.5. "Colorizing" Scripts

33.6. Optimizations

33.7. Assorted Tips

33.8. Security Issues

33.9. Portability Issues

33.10. Shell Scripting Under Windows

34. Bash, versions 2 and 3

34.1. Bash, version2

34.2. Bash, version 3