Anandu Aman

Shell Scripting. The long and short of it is that bash is available for Unix systems, is relatively powerful, and for the most part, unchanging, scripting environment. Old Solaris Boxes, BSD machines, and every Linux box has bash available. Unlike python, if you have and older version of bash available, you are unlikely to even notice. So outside of a few people concerned with POSIX compliant shell scripting ( P1003.2 ) , you are probably doing your scripting in bash - its quite portable. The Unix shell generally is quite powerful. A Unix shell is a macro processor than executes programs. Most, including bash, come with relatively sophisticated string processing, in bash including left and right hand striping, tokenizing, and even regular expressions. Special features for working with files including redirection and globbing, as well as building tests for file attributes (writable?, directory? into the conditional test builtin. ([[ -e $FILE ]]) . Finally, the pipelined model of data fl...

In the following file, all references made to the name Unix, may also be substituted to the Xenix operating system. Brief history: Back in the early sixties, during the development of third generation computers at MIT, a group of programmers studying the potential of computers, discovered their ability of performing two or more tasks simultaneously. Bell Labs, taking notice of this discovery, provided funds for their developmental scientists to investigate into this new frontier. After about 2 years of developmental research, they produced an operating system they called "Unix". Sixties to Current: During this time Bell Systems installed the Unix system to provide their computer operators with the ability to multitask so that they could become more productive, and efficient. One of the systems they put on the Unix system was called "Elmos". Through Elmos many tasks (i.e. billing, and installation records) could be do...