Bash Pocket Reference 2e

It’s simple: if you want to interact deeply with Mac OS X, Linux, and other Unix-like systems, you need to know how to work with the Bash shell. This concise little book puts all of the essential information about Bash right at your fingertips.

You’ll quickly find answers to the annoying questions that generally come up when you’re writing shell scripts: What characters do you need to quote? How do you get variable substitution to do exactly what you want? How do you use arrays? Updated for Bash version 4.4, this book has the answers to these and other problems in a format that makes browsing quick and easy.

Topics include:

Invoking the shell
Syntax
Functions and variables
Arithmetic expressions
Command history
Programmable completion
Job control
Shell options
Command execution
Coprocesses
Restricted shells
Built-in commands

About the Author

Arnold Robbins, an Atlanta native, is a professional programmer and technical author. He has worked with Unix systems since 1980, when he was introduced to a PDP-11 running a version of Sixth Edition Unix. He has been a heavy AWK user since 1987, when he became involved with gawk, the GNU project’s version of AWK. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for AWK. He is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation. He is also coauthor of the sixth edition of O’Reilly’s Learning the vi Editor. Since late 1997, he and his family have been living happily in Israel.

Author Biography

Arnold Robbins is a professional programmer and technical author who has worked with Unix systems since 1980 and has been using AWK since 1987. As a member of the POSIX 1003.2 balloting group, he helped shape the POSIX standard for AWK. Arnold is currently the maintainer of gawk and its documentation. He is coauthor of the sixth edition of O’Reilly’s Learning the vi Editor.