Introduction

The Bourne Shell is a "command interpreter"; it takes your commands and interprets them to the system. This tutorial will help you learn to program the shell to make your daily work easier.

For example, if you have to execute a series of commands every day, you may get tired of typing the commands each time. By programming the shell, you can create a shell script, a file containing all of the commands that need to be executed each day. To execute the commands, you only need execute the shell script.

This tutorial will discuss several concepts which are related to programming. If you are familiar with a programming language (such as C, Pascal, or BASIC) you should have no difficulty understanding the concepts in this tutorial. If you have never programmed before, you may wish to read about concepts such as loops, which are used to repeat a specific sequence of commands more than once, condition statements, which are used to select, based on existing values in the shell environment, which commands to execute, and variables, which are used to store alphanumeric values that may be used in more than one place and/or that may change over time. Computer literacy books and beginning programming books discuss these concepts.