Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Apple’s Shell Scripting Primer

Apple (via Jonathan Rentzsch):

You should read this document if you are interested in learning the basics of shell scripting. This document assumes that you already have some basic understanding of at least one procedural programming language such as C. It does not assume that you have very much knowledge of commands executed from the terminal, though, and thus should be readable even if you have never run the Terminal application before.

This looks surprisingly good.

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I think it's worth mentioning that this has been around for ages. When some people insist on not reading documentation or at least considering it a chore, this is what they're missing out on.

@Jesper Yeah, the copyright says 2003. I think I’m pretty good at reading the documentation, but I missed this back then, and I guess Rentzsch did, too.

Not sure what the copyright year is referring to, since revision history says the first version came out 2006. Which is still "ages".

I discovered Apple's shell scripting primer years ago while browsing developer documentation, and it has been my go-to reference for all my shell scripting work (at home and at work, including on non-Apple platforms) ever since. Especially useful when like me you do she'll scripting only occasionally and you forget half of if between each time.

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