HTC Unix/Linux Shell Scripting Page

Shell scripting seems to confuse quite a few people. In concept, it's no different than writing a batch file. In practice, it's merely putting a series of commands into a text file. It can, however, be much more than just a set of commands in a file. A shell script can bring in command-line arguments, just like a regular program. It can request input from a user. It can read from and write to files. Shell scripts can contain complex logic. The limit of what a shell script can do is essentially the limit of the author's imagination and skill.

I've linked to several shell scripting tutorials here. I hope you find them useful.

The Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide at Linuxdoc. Don't worry, this assumes no prior knowledge on your part.
Linuxorbit's Introduction to Bash shell scripting article.
About.com's page on The Bash shell, containing several links to FAQs and programming tutorials.

Hopefully, those four links are enough to get you going. Here are several examples of shell scripts.

Retire.bash--a shell script which takes a username and removes an account from the system.
verify.bash--a shell script which does a long listing of a filename, then runs the md5sum program on it to get a checksum. Useful for verifying downloaded CD iso images.
unix1_grader.awk. Even though this is a big awk command in a text file, it's still a shell script, since the shell is what executes awk. This is the program I use to compute everyone's Unix1 grade.
slacker.bash. This script runs and tells me who has an account but has never even logged into the system.