Spring, 2025
Jewett

This page serves as a resource for scripting information.
If you find other links that you think would benefit your fellow students, please contact me.

Introduction to the command interpreters (shells) and scripting:

• Comparison of command shells
• Shell script basics (from Apple)

Bash:

1. HOW-TO (getting started with bash scripting)
2. Introduction (Wikipedia)
   
3. Bash guide (guide for beginners)
   
4. Bash scripting tutorial for beginners
5. Tutorial (HTML and PDFs)
   
6. Another tutorial (hypexr.org)
7. Intro to shell scripting with Bash (PDF)

Csh:

1. Wikipedia:  csh and tcsh
2. Linux Shell Scripting (you won't need this for our class, but it is put here for your possible later use)
   
3. Some argue csh should not be used for scripting, particularly for more complex tasks.
   
4. One page says "If you have the time and are presently using csh or tcsh it is worth considering a switch to a Bourne shell variant."

Zsh:

• It is "designed for interactive use, [but] is also a powerful scripting language" -- from zsh.sourceforge.io
• The 'oh my zsh' open source framework for zsh.
• Learning the basics of the zsh shell
• Zsh is now the default on MacOS. For more info, see The macOS Terminal (zsh) - Getting Started

Other shells:

• Bash and csh are rather old now. You should educate yourself about other choices!
• The differences between Bash, Zsh and other Linux shells
• Differences among login shells
• History of and differences among shells: from unix stackexchange