Module 1: Introduction to the Shell

• Shell script strengths and weaknesses
• Shells
• Switching user contexts
• Example shell script
• Shell and environment variables
• Key environment variables
• Which and type
• General quoting rules
• Nesting commands
• Help from commands and documentation
• whereis
• Getting help within the graphical desktop
• Getting help with man and info
• $MANPATH, whatis, and apropos

Module 2: Shell Scripting Basics

• Positional parameters
• Input and output
• printf
• alias
• Functions
• Colors in scripts
• Custom bash prompts

Module 3: Working with Files

• Communication channels
• File redirection
• Piping commands together
• Doing math
• Filesystem structures
• Determining disk usage with df and du
• cron
• The crontab command
• crontab format
• /etc/cron.*/ directories
• Sending email with mailx

Module 4: Regular Expressions

• Searching inside files
• Regular expression overview
• Regular expression implementations
• Regular expressions
• RE character classes
• Regex quantifiers
• RE parenthesis
• The streaming editor

Module 5: Branching and Looping

• Exit status
• Comparisons with test
• Conditional statements
• Flow control: case
• Flow control: while and until loops
• The borne for-loop
• Flow control: select

Module 6: Data Munging

• Text processing with Awk
• Text sorting
• Duplicate removal utility
• Extracting columns of text

Module 7: Security, Whitespace, and Other Gotchas

• Error handling
• Gotcha: quoting variables
• Gotcha: locales
• Gotchas: maximum command length
• Gotcha: whitespace in for loops
• Reading files with while
• Gotcha: $IFS
• Gotcha: printing in .bashrc
• Gotcha: aliases

Appendix A: Challenge

• Apache configuration files
• httpd.conf and virtual host configuration

Appendix B: Emacs

• Emacs
• The Emacs interface
• Basic Emacs
• More Emacs commands

Appendix C: The Secure Shell (SSH)

• OpenSSH client and server configuration
• Accessing remote shells
• Transferring files
• SSH key management