Member Avatar for pooh1234qwerty

i am a beginner. i need online tutorial for shell scripting. there are many on the web.. which one to choose??

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raised a common beginner question; and pointed toward Bash-focused materials. To complement those pointers, here is a concise, pragmatic path and a few hands-on tips to build useful shell skills quickly.

  • Decide the target shell and platform first. For scripts that must run on many Unix variants, favor POSIX sh. For Linux-only tooling, learn Bash features next.
  • Core fundamentals: shebang and execute bits, quoting ("$var"), command substitution, exit codes, pipes and redirection. Mastering quoting and exit-status handling prevents most bugs.
  • Control flow and structure: if/case, loops, functions and return codes. Keep functions small and use local for temporary variables.
  • I/O and advanced topics: here-documents, file-descriptor redirection, process substitution, trap for cleanup, and parameter expansion. Learn which constructs are portable and which are shell-specific.
  • Safety and debugging: use strict options and linting (see code example). Run bash -n for syntax checks and bash -x to trace execution; use a linter to catch common mistakes.

A tiny safe-template to start scripts:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail
IFS=$'\n\t'

main() {
  local file="${1:-/dev/stdin}"
  printf '%s: %d lines\n' "$file" "$(wc -l < "$file")"
}

main "$@"

Practical practice suggestions: automate a small routine (daily backup or log rotation), write a CSV-to-simple-report script, and convert an ad-hoc sequence of commands into a reusable script with flags (use getopts). Common pitfalls to watch for: unquoted variables, parsing ls output, and assuming echo behavior. Test scripts on the actual shell/version where they will run and add simple tests (example inputs, expected outputs) as confidence builds.

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Member Avatar for chris.stout

If you're using BASH, Linux Config's Bash Tutorial is quite helpful. TLDP also has some great guides on BASH.

Edited by chris.stout because: left out apostrophe
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