<div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Why 'get into serious shell scripting'? Anything over a hundred lines<br>should not IMO be written in shell code. It won't be portable, and it
<br>will be a pain to maintain. Oh well. I'm just about to hack into an 800<br>- 900 line monster!</blockquote><br>Basic understanding of sed and awk may be useful (I've not had to bother<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
with awk in many years in the business) but in depth knowledge is not<br>essential.</blockquote><div><br>Yes probably the right way to go about awk and sed unless there was a requirement to use it more heavily.</div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
You'd do better (IMO) to concentrate on your favourite programming<br>language (be it Perl or one of those other ones), and just picking up<br>the shell and awk stuff that you need to understand other people's<br>
scripts that you need to maintain.</blockquote><div><br>Yes i have been picking up shell scripting for a while now - but my knowledge is all a bit disjointed. I need something to solidify all the stuff i know and 'half know' how to do and hence the book to get that started. The other reason for not concentrating on perl/python/ruby/etc is because shell scripts are the glue that hold together a unix system and i wanted to be able to quickly read and understand system scripts and also to modify and make my own custom ones.
<br><br></div></div>