UNIX Advanced Shell Programming Tools

Course Description:

This course is designed to give delegates practical experience using a range of UNIX tools to manipulate text and incorporate them into UNIX shell scripts. It will benefit programmers, developers and system administrators who need to construct shell scripts using advanced text handling facilities.

The delegate will practice:

• Backing up and restoring files
• Scheduling background jobs using cron and at
• Using regular expressions
• Searching files for patterns with the grep family of commands
• Editing text files with sed
• Using file comparison utilities
• Using the head and tail utilities
• Using the cut and paste utilities
• Using split and csplit
• Identifying and translating characters
• Sorting files
• Translating characters in a file
• Selecting text from files with the grep family of commands
• Creating programs with awk

This course includes the following modules:

Redirection, Pipes and Filters

• Standard I/O and redirection
• Pipes
• Command separation
• Conditional execution
• Grouping Commands
• UNIX filters
• The tee command

Backup and Restore Utilities

• Archive devices
• The cpio command
• The tar command
• The dd command

Background Job Scheduling

• Starting background jobs
• Background tasks and the nohup command
• Process priorities and the nice command
• Job control
• Scheduling jobs with the at command
• Scheduling jobs with the cron command

Regular Expression Notation

• Regular expressions
• Extended regular expressions

Searching Files for Patterns

• The grep family of commands
• The grep command
• The fgrep command
• The egrep command

The Stream Editor - sed

• Introduction and command line syntax
• The sed program structure
• sed program processing
• Use sed commands
• sed addresses
• sed instructions
• Hold and get functions
• Advanced flow control

Commands for Comparing Files

• Compare two files with the cmp command
• Compare two files with the comm command
• Compare two files with the diff and sdiff commands
• Compare large files with the bdiff command

File Manipulation Commands

• The head and tail commands
• The cut command
• The paste command
• The pr command
• The split and csplit commands

Identify and Translate Characters

• od - octal dump
• Use cat to display non-printing characters
• The expand and unexpand commands
• The tr command

Sorting Files

• The sort command
• Specify sort keys with -k
• Sort by column positions
• The uniq command

Introduction to the Pattern Scanning Untility - awk

• Introduction and command line syntax
• The awk program structure
• Use regular expressions
• Operators
• Simple patterns
• Extended patterns
• Comments
• Special patterns (BEGIN and END)
• Program variables
• Mathematical operators
• Enhanced printing
• Handling user variables

awk Program Control Structures

• Program control structures
• The if construct
• The while and do ... while constructs
• The basic for construct
• Associative array handling
• Functions