Shell Scripting Tutorial on Kindle

Unix & Linux Shell Scripting Tutorial on Kindle

The Shell Scripting tutorial at http://steve-parker.org is now available natively on the Kindle!

USA (amazon.com)

UK (amazon.co.uk)

Similarly, you can search for “B00C2EGNSA” on any Amazon site, or just go to http://www.amazon.COUNTRY/dp/B00C2EGNSA (where “COUNTRY” is .fr, .de, etc) for your local equivalent.

Shell Scripting page on Facebook

Shell Scripting

My Shell Scripting book, due out on August 12th by Wrox, now has a page on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Shell-Scripting/175263275869249. Feel free to “Like” it, and get the latest updates on the project.

I have the final pages to proofread this week, ready to go to the printers. It’s looking like 576 pages, a little bit over the target of 504 pages, but close enough.

I will update the Table of Contents at http://sgpit.com/book/ once the page count is finalised.

Update on Shell Scripting Recipes book

Wow, it’s been nearly two months since I last made a post about the upcoming book on shell scripting. I’m really sorry, I had intended to give much more real-time updates here. The book focusses on GNU/Linux and the Bash shell in particular, but it does cover the other environments too – Solaris, Bourne Shell, as well as mentions for ksh, zsh, *BSD and the rest of the Unix family.

In terms of page count, it is currently 89% finished. There is still the proof-reading to be done, and whatever delivery details the publishers need to deal with, so the availability date of some time in August is still on schedule. I notice that http://amzn.com/1118024486 is already offering a massive discount on the cover price; I have no idea what that is about, I’m trying not to take offence – they can’t have dismissed the book already as I have not quite finished writing it yet! So hopefully you can get a bargain while it’s cheap.

The subject matter has the potential to be quite boring if presented as a list of tedious system administration tasks, so I have tried to make it light and fun whenever I can; it’s still with Legal at the moment, but I hope to have a Space Invaders clone written entirely in the shell published in the book. People don’t tend to see the Shell as being capable of doing anything interactive at all, so it is nice to write a playable interactive game in the shell. The main problem in terms of playability is in working out how much to slow it down, and at what stage! Of course, being a shell script, you can tweak the starting value, the level at which it speeds up, and anything else about the gameplay. If the game doesn’t make it in to the book, I’ll post it here anyway, and will welcome your contributions on gameplay.

Other than games, I’ve got recipes for init scripts, conditional execution, translating scripts into other (human) languages, even writing CGI scripts in the shell. There is coverage of arrays, functions, libraries, process control, wildcards and filename expansion, pipes and pipelines, exec and redirection of input and output; this book aims to cover pretty much all that you need to know about shell scripting without being a tedious list of what the bash shell can do.

There is a status page at http://sgpit.com/book which also has order information; you can pre-order your copy from there.

Use of pipes, and other nifty tricks

http://www.tuxradar.com/content/command-line-tricks-smart-geeks has some useful tricks. A lot of it is presented as being bash-specific, but isn’t. Also, a lot seems Linux-specific, but isn’t. Lots of useful info for all Unix/Linux admins here. These hints go on and on; hardly any of them are the generic stuff you often see on Ubuntu forums, stumbleupon, and so on.

Book

A serious publisher has contacted me about writing a serious book about Linux shell programming.

It is all really very serious. I’m not used to being serious, as you can probably tell from the fact that I have now used the word “serious” four times in this three-sentence post.

I am rather keen to write a book on the subject, not because I’m vain, or desperate for money, but because the stuff I have seen out there in dead-tree format has been of rather low quality. Also because of all the emails I’ve received over the years, they have all been positive, and none has said anything along the lines of “I didn’t need any of that because I bought Book[X]”, or indeed any book. People have emailed me, asking for advice as to what book to buy, and I have been unable to recommend any book that I have seen.

So:

What would you like to see in your ideal book about UNIX / Linux shell scripting, be it Bourne, Bash, ksh, tcsh, zsh, whatever?

Please don’t be timid; if you want to know how to work out how many nose-flutes can be fitted into the area of a Boeing 757, you won’t be anything like as strange as some of the correspondants I’ve had over the years, so please, tell me what is bugging you, what has bugged you, or even what you think might be likely to bug you in days / months / years to come.

I’m likely to answer any specific questions here and now, whether or not they end up in the book, but anything you’d like to see in a book, too… post that here, and I’ll have a stab at it.

Also, I would of course be interested to know if you have found any useful books on or around the subject, and what they did particularly well.

Steve

Happy First Birthday!

This blog has now been running for a year; the first post was Hello World on 17th Jan 2007.

I hadn’t realised it had been going for so long; in that time, I’ve made 41 posts, so I haven’t quite managed to make one post per week 😦 I have been a bit slack lately, for which I do apologise. New Years Resolution: I must make more posts here!

In the meantime, my main site, steve-parker.org, has celebrated its seventh birthday, having been born in June 2000 – looking forward to making the 8th birthday celebrations this June!

Understanding init scripts

UNIX and Linux systems use “init scripts” – scripts typically placed in /etc/init.d/ which are run when the system starts up and shuts down (or changes runlevels, but we won’t go into that level of detail here, being more of a sysadmin topic than a shell scripting topic). In a typical setup, /etc/init.d/myservice is linked to /etc/rc2.d/S70myservice. That is to say, /etc/init.d/myservice is the real file, but the rc2.d file is a symbolic link to it, called "S70myservice". The “S” means “Start”, and “70” says when it should be run – lower-numbered scripts are run first. The range is usually 1-99, but there are no rules. /etc/rc0.d/K30myservice (for shutdown), or /etc/rc6.d/K30myservice (for reboot; possibly a different scenario for some services), will be the corresponding “Kill” scripts. Again, you can control the order in which your services are shut down; K01* first, to K99* last.

All of these rc scripts are just symbolic links to /etc/init.d/myservice, so there is just one actual shell script, which takes care of starting or stopping the service. The Samba init script from Solaris is a nice and simple script to use as an example:

case "$1" in
start)
	[ -f /etc/sfw/smb.conf ] || exit 0

	/usr/sfw/sbin/smbd -D
	/usr/sfw/sbin/nmbd -D
	;;
stop)
	pkill smbd
	pkill nmdb
	;;
*)
	echo "Usage: $0 { start | stop }"
	exit 1
	;;
esac
exit 0

The init daemon, which controls init scripts, calls a startup script as "/etc/rc2.d/S70myservice start", and a shutdown script as "/etc/rc0.d/K30myservice stop". So we have to check the variable $1 to see what action we need to take. (See http://steve-parker.org/sh/variables2.shtml to read about what $1 means – in this case, it’s either “start” or “stop”).

So we use case (follow link for more detail) to see what we are required to do.

In this example, if it’s “start”, then it will run the three commands:

	[ -f /etc/sfw/smb.conf ] || exit 0
	/usr/sfw/sbin/smbd -D
	/usr/sfw/sbin/nmbd -D

Where line 1 checks that smb.conf exists; there is no point continuing if it doesn’t exist, just “exit 0” (success) so the system continues booting as normal. Lines 2 and 3 start the two daemons required for Samba.

If it’s “stop”, then it will run these two commands:

	pkill smbd
	pkill nmdb

pkill means “Process Kill”, and it simply kills off the two processes started by the “start” option.

The "*)" construct catches any other uses, and simply replies that the correct syntax is to call it with either “start” or “stop” – nothing else will do. Some services allow for status reports, restarting, and so on. The one thing we do need to provide is “start”. Most services also have a “stop” function. All others are optional.

The simplest possible init script would be this, to control an Apache webserver:

#!/bin/sh
/usr/sbin/apachectl $1

Apache comes with a program called “apachectl” (or “apache2ctl”), which will take “stop” and “start” as arguments, and act accordingly. It will also take “restart”, “status”, “configtest”, and a few more options, but that one-line script would be enough to act as /etc/init.d/apache, with /etc/rc2.d/S90apache and /etc/rc0.d/K10apache linking to it. To be frank, even that is not necessary; you could just link /usr/sbin/apachectl into /etc/init.d/apache. In reality, it’s normally good to provide a few sanity-checks in addition to the basic stop/start functionality.

The vast majority of init scripts use the case command; around that, you can wrap all sorts of other things – most GNU/Linux distributions include a generic reporting script (typically /lib/lsb/init-functions – to report “OK” or “FAILED”), read in a config file (like the Samba example above), define functions for the more involved aspects of starting, stopping, or reporting on the status of the service, and so on.

Some (eg, SuSE) have an “INIT INFO” block, which may allow the init daemon a bit more control over the order in which services are started. Ubuntu’s Upstart is another; Solaris 10 uses pmf (Process Monitor Facility), which starts and stops processes, but also monitors them to check that they are running as expected.

After a good decade of stability, in 2007 the world of init scripts appears to be changing, potentially quite significantly. However, I’m not here to speculate on future developments, this post is just to document the stable interface which is init scripts. Even if other things change, the basic “start|stop” syntax is going to be with us for a long time to come. It is easy, but often important, to understand what is going on.

In closing, I will list the run-levels, and what each run-level provides:

0: Shut down the OS (without powering off the machine)
1, s, S: Single-User mode. Networking is not enabled.
2: Networking enabled (not NFS, Printers)
3: Normal operating mode (including NFS, Printers)
4: Not normally used
5: Shut down the OS and power off the machine
6: Reboot the OS.

Some GNU/Linux distributions change these definitions – in particular, Debian provides all network services at runlevel 2, not 3. Run-level 5 is also sometimes used to start the graphical (X) interface.