Advanced Unix Tools & Shell Scripts Course

The objective of this course is to provide a comprehensive understanding of some of the more advanced features of the Unix Operating System.

The course builds on the skills developed in the Unix Fundamentals and Shell Programming Course, and shows how the use of advanced Unix utilities and shell programming can save time and ease the task of administration.

Delegates should be familiar with the Unix Operating System to the level achieved by the Unix Fundamentals and Shell Programming courses.

Topics covered on the 2 day Advanced Unix Tools & Shell Scripts course

Review of Unix commands

• Command options, manual pages, redirection, pipes

Finding files

• Review of the Find command syntax, defining search, find actions, executing commands on matched files.

Finding patterns in files

• Review of grep regular expressions, special characters.

Sorting the contents of files

• Review of sort, ASCII, normal sort, numeric sort, merging sorted files, saving the sorted output, sort keys, multiple keys, field separators, duplicated records, case sensitivity.

The sed command

• Command syntax, options for command line expressions & expressions in files, suppressing default output, operations (delete, append, insert, change & substitute), operation addresses, regular expressions in sed, creating sed files, expression syntax and special characters, global changes, reading and writing files with sed, quitting.

The awk command

• Command syntax, referencing fields, printing fields, awk expressions in files, built in patterns and variables, conditional expressions, logical expressions, regular expressions in awk, formatted printing, control structure, looping commands, default field separators & changing the default, built in functions.

Fields & characters

• Substitution of characters with tr, squeezing multiple characters and deleting, cutting fields from files and standard in, field delimiters in cut, character cutting.

Korn shell extensions

• Metacharacters, command substitution, debugging shell scripts, arithmetic expressions, valid operators, checking and assigning values, substrings, extracting patterns from strings, variable length, arrays, alternative to if, functions.