Summary

We have covered a large amount of material in this chapter and practiced with real-world examples and longer scripts. You should now have got a fairly comprehensive idea of how to program with the shell and also got a hint of how to go about solving real-world problems with it.

There is a lot more material that is beyond the scope of an introductory book, but we hope that students will investigate and learn more as they gather experience and seek more knowledge.

Shell scripts have been automating a large number of servers for more than 40 years now and the shell, even if a bit rough on the edges and somewhat archaic in its approach, is the workhorse and Swiss-army knife of all system administrators and serious developers.

In this fairly brief book, we have learned quite a bit about how to use the command line, as well as the popular tools associated with it. Just like a workshop can be extended with new tools to build more complex things, this framework of the...