More than ten years after the first edition of Learning the bash Shell (In a Nutshell (O'Reilly)) came out, there appeared a book that sums up all the experience and expertise the authors have gained since those times using this shell. If you're new to Unix/Linux, start with the work linked in above, but if you have been using either of these systems for some time and you would like to learn how to make your life easier, then this is the book for you.

Why? Because it concentrates on teaching you how to solve your problems. After a brief introduction and setting the basics the real depth begins: 1. a problem, 2. developing a solution, 3. evaluating the solution. And lots of examples. Naturally, the first step is to recognise that you have a problem, which the book also teaches you: some people tend to suffer while doing a repetitive and uninteresting chore but does not even occur to them that it does not need to be so: they can turn the chore into a hunt for automatisation putting their brain to some creative use, so instead of numbing their mind they start sharping it, and this is exactly where this book comes in.

Presently, amazon.com does not offer you a look into the book, but you can have a preview of every chapter and also a full view of the table of contents at the publisher's page: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596526788/toc.html. Than come back here, as Amazon's price is much better. (At the time of writing this, there is a 37% discount.)

When I read the description the book said that "bash Cookbook" teaches shell scripting the way Unix masters practice the craft." Not even close. This book doesn't teach a thing. All it gives is "recipes-" solutions for problems that you may never even encounter. Also, these recipes are directed at people with a ton of experience in the shell already. They reference tons of commands with functions that vary over the entirety of what the shell can do without even an index that gives one sentence descriptions of the commands. I'm a novice. I don't know what cat, grep, eval, etc. do. And it is very annoying to have to read the book with my computer in my lap so I can reference the man pages. If you are a novice don't buy this book.

This book is indeed a "Cookbook"; nice examples on how to do lots of stuff. It is nicely categorized and the explanations/discussions are easy to follow. The authors seem to have lots of experience, and are honest enough to even explain when NOT to use bash; when for example perl would do better.

Highly recommended if you want to get stuff done using bash.

Currently this is the only book that specifically covers bash 3.2, the version that contain new and interesting features like =~ operator for "normal" regular expression matching.

The main advantage of the book that it really covers a lot of ground and provides system administrators and users with a lot of good and difficult to find tips about customizing of the environment and making yourself more productive.

Chapters 5-6 which provide good overview of new features introduced in version 3.x including "normal" regular expressions pattern matching ( operator =~) and C-style for loop. One problem with shells traditionally use two completely obsolete notations for regular expressions (basic regular expression often known as DOS-style regular expressions plus quite perverse prefix notation ). Bash 3.2 did not fixes this problem as this is a problem of Unix in general (Unix can be called an Os that uses a dozen of different definitions of regular expressions :-) that but at least added a normal regular expression notion to the list.

After chapters 5 and 6 I recommend reading chapters 9, 17 and 19 and then the rest. While chapters are of very uneven quality, usually you can find at least one useful tip in each.

The spectrum of bash related tips and useful mini-scripts is quote substantial. The authors cover classic things like customizing prompt quite well. The book is not only about bash it covers a lot of ground including use of classic Unix utilities in scripting (most notably grep, find, sort, and date) along with related topics such as use of pipes and I/O redirection.

Of course for such a complex topic there are some shortcomings. It's a pretty difficult task to write a good cookbook but authors did an excellent job and provided many very valuable tips that can help to improve both system administrators and power users productivity.

One of the problems for a cookbook is a good organization and specifically a good starting chapter and here authors failed. Some chapters are half-baked. The Chapter about version control is badly written and very superficial. The authors just mention a couple of system without any details. And in this topic the devil is in details.

Some bash features are explained superficially. For example bash has horrible implementation of pushd/popd/dirs troika and it not that easy to use them productively. One notable deficiency is that there is no way to suppress duplicates which in essence make this feature almost unusable. The authors treatment looks like a baseless advertizing of a poorly implemented feature.

But I hope that the authors will improve the book in the next edition and I am reluctant to downgrade the book based on those flaws. After all, this is a cookbook and it should be judged by the best recipes not the worst.

These O'Reilly Cookbooks should be on every sysadmin's shelf. The Bash Cookbook is no different. Incredibly useful book. I didn't read it cover to cover but have gone back to it at least 15-20 times to pull out nuggets of info. The real-world, practical examples and solutions offered in this book provide the sysadmin with a virtual swiss army knife when working with bash.

Book was so useful, I bought two extra copies and sent them to coworkers.

Linux system admin is something I do as part of my job. I've been able to acquire the basics and get the job done, but I knew that there were better ways to get the job done. Nothing like having an expert to help learn the ins and outs.

This book allowed me to take it to the next level. There are many excellent examples on how to get it done, as well as advice on things that should not be done.

There is a good mix of newbie info as well as useful tips for the seasoned veteran. There's usually more than one way to get the job done, and this book showed me some new, better ways to accomplish the task at hand.

If you're working with bash, you'll find something useful in this book.

This book covers the GNU Bourne Again Shell, which is a member of the Bourne family of shells that includes the original Bourne shell sh, the Korn shell ksh, and the Public Domain Korn Shell pdksh. This book is for anyone who uses a Unix or Linux system, as well as system administrators who may use several systems on any given day. Thus, there are solutions and useful sections for all levels of users including newcomers. This book is full of recipes for creating scripts and interacting with the shell that will allow you to greatly increase your productivity.

Chapter 1, "Beginning bash" covers what a shell is, why you should care about it, and then the basics of bash including how you get it on your system. The next five chapters are on the basics that you would need when working with any shell - standard I/O, command execution, shell variables, and shell logic and arithmetic. Next there are two chapters on "Intermediate Shell Tools". These chapters' recipes use some utilities that are not part of the shell, but which are so useful that it is hard to imagine using the shell without them, such as "sort" and "grep", for example. Chapter nine features recipes that allow you to find files by case, date, type, size, etc. Chapter 10, "Additional Features for Scripting" has much to do with code reuse, which is something you find even in scripting. Chapter 11, "Working with Dates and Times", seems like it would be very simple, but it's not. This chapter helps you get through the complexities of dealing with different formats for displaying the time and date and converting between various date formats.

Chapter 12, "End-User Tasks As Shell Scripts", shows you a few larger though not large examples of scripts. They are meant to give you useful, real world examples of actual uses of shell scripts beyond just system administration tasks. Chapter 13, "Parsing and Similar Tasks", is about tasks that will be familiar to programmers. It's not necessarily full of more advanced scripts than the other recipes in the book, but if you are not a programmer, these tasks might seem obscure or irrelevant to your use of bash. Topics covered include parsing HTML, setting up a database with MySQL, and both trimming and compressing whitespace. Chapter 14 is on dealing with the security of your shell scripts. Chapters 15 through 19 finish up the book starting with a chapter on advanced scripting that focuses on script portability. Chapter 16 is related to the previous chapter on portability and is concerned with configuring and customizing your bash environment. Chapter 17 is about miscellaneous items that didn't fit well into any other chapter. The subjects include capturing file metadata for recovery, sharing and logging sessions, and unzipping many ZIP files at once. Chapter 18 deals with shortcuts aimed at the limiting factor of many uses of bash - the typing speed of the user and shortcuts that cut down on the amount of typing necessary. The final chapter in the book, "Tips and Traps", deals with the common mistakes that bash users make.

All in all this is a very handy reference for a vast number of the tasks that you'll come across when scripting with the bash shell along with well-commented code. Highly recommended.