This comprehensive book is a practical, easy-to-use guide to programming and using the Bourne shell for beginners and experienced users - the Bourne shell is the standard shell for UNIX, and is also fully backward compatible to the Linux BASH shell. This book will fully illustrate the ability of the shell to unlock the real potential of UNIX and Linux, and aims to get the reader up, running and creating robust shell scripts for real tasks and situations as quickly as possible - shell scripts that will work on any mainstream UNIX or Linux machine.

If you are new to UNIX and Linux or if you are a power user in waiting then this book is for you. Most shell programming books merely annotate manual pages and syntax, but in this book users of all abilities will find plenty of practical working examples - all of which are available as full code script via an ftp site - as well as a host of tips, tricks and code one-liners, that will save you time on a day-to-day basis. The book is organized into self-contained chapters on individual topics for ease of reference.