Linux Advanced Shell Programming Tools

Who will the Course Benefit?

Programmers,developers and system administrators who need to construct shell scripts and process text files using advanced text handling facilities.

The Linux Advanced Shell Programming Tools course assumes knowledge of the Linux Operating System to the level covered in the Linux Introduction course. Some shell programming experience to the level covered in Linux Shell Programming is also necessary.

Course Objectives

To provide the knowledge and skills to make effective use of a wide range of standard Linux programming and development tools.

Linux Advanced Shell Programming Tools Training Course

Course Contents - DAY 1

Course Introduction

• Administration and Course Materials
• Course Structure and Agenda
• Delegate and Trainer Introductions

Session 1: BACKUP AND RESTORE UTILITIES

• Backing-up and restoring files
• Basic and advanced use of tar
• Compression utilities gzip,bzip2,zip and compress
• Exercise: Backing up and restoring files using tar
• Exercises: Compressing files

Session 2: BACKGROUND JOB SCHEDULING

• Scheduling jobs with the cron command
• Scheduling jobs with the at command
• Exercises: Running background jobs

Session 3: COMMANDS FOR COMPARING FILES

• Compare files with the cmp command
• Compare and format files with pr
• Compare files with the comm command
• Compare files with the diff and sdiff commands
• Compare large files with the bdiff command
• Exercises: Identifying file differences

Session 4: SPLITTING FILES

• The fold command
• Split files using context and content rules
• Exercises: Splitting files

Linux Advanced Shell Programming Tools Training Course

Course Contents - DAY 2

Session 5: IDENTIFYING AND TRANSLATING CHARACTERS

• od - octal dump
• Use cat to display non-printing characters
• View and format files with nl
• The expand and unexpand commands to convert between tab and space characters
• The tr command for character translation
• Exercises: Translating characters with tr

Session 6: REGULAR EXPRESSION NOTATION REVIEW

• Standard regular expressions
• Searching with grep
• Metacharacters,positional characters and quantifiers
• Extended regular expressions
• POSIX character classes
• PERL expressions

Session 7: THE STREAM EDITOR sed

• sed command line syntax
• sed script files
• sed command processing
• sed addresses and simple instructions
• sed pattern space and hold space
• Grouping sed commands
• Hold and get functions
• Advanced flow control
• Write output to temporary files
• Exercises: Text processing with sed

Session 8: FUNDAMENTALS OF AWK

• Basic AWK usage
• AWK program-files
• AWK scripts
• AWK variables
• Pattern matching with AWK
• AWK extended patterns

Session 9: AWK OPERATORS

• AWK AND,OR and range operators
• AWK arithmetic operations
• AWK output
• Formatting output with printf
• Exercises: Create awk scripts to extract selected data from a file and generate reports

Linux Advanced Shell Programming Tools Training Course

Course Contents - DAY 3

Session 10: AWK PROGRAM CONTROL STRUCTURES

• The BEGIN and END functions
• The AWK if construct
• The AWK else if construct
• The AWK while construct
• Other program control statements
• The AWK break,continue and exit statements
• User defined functions
• Exercises: Create AWK scripts and program-files utilising program control structures

Session 11: AWK FUNCTIONS

• AWK string functions
• AWK length,tolower,toupper,index,sub,gsub,match,substr,split,sprintf,system and getline functions
• Exercises: Generate AWK scripts and program-files to extract and format data using AWK functions

Session 12: AWK ARRAYS

• AWK associative arrays
• Multi-dimensional arrays
• Exercises: Create AWK associative arrays to process text files and generate reports

Session 13: MISCELLANEOUS TOOLS

• bc (calculator)
• fuser (testing for files in use)
• getops (checking options passed to shell scripts)
• printf (formatting screen output)
• logger (script logging)
• xargs (generating arguments for a command)
• eval (re-evaluating variables)
• Exercises: Using tools within a shell script

Requirements

The Linux Advanced Shell Programming Tools course assumes knowledge of the Linux operating system to the level covered in the Linux Introduction course. Knowledge of Linux Shell Programming to the level covered on the Linux Shell Programming course is also a requirement. Alternatively,relevant experience of UNIX or Linux servers is required.

Further Learning

• Linux System Administration (LPI)
• Oracle SQL