AIX Advanced Shell Programming Tools — A 3-Day Course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Synopsis

This course is designed to give delegates practical experience using a range of AIX tools to manipulate text and incorporate them into AIX shell scripts.

The delegate will practice:-

• Using the shell command line editor
• Backing up and restoring files
• Scheduling background jobs using cron and at
• Using regular expressions
• Searching files for patterns with the grep family of commands
• Editing text files with sed
• Using file comparison utilities
• Using the head and tail utilities
• Using the cut and paste utilities
• Using split and csplit
• Identifying and translating characters
• Sorting files
• Translating characters in a file
• Selecting text from files with the grep family of commands
• Creating programs with awk

Course Objectives

On completion of this course, the delegate will be able to make effective use of a wide range of standard AIX programming and development tools.

Suitable for

• Programmers, developers and system administrators who need to construct shellscripts using advanced text handling facilities.

Prerequisites

• Knowledge of the AIX Operating System to the level covered in the AIX Basics course
• Shell programming experience to the level covered in AIX Shell Programming course

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Course Contents:

Review of Shell Fundamentals

• Review of AIX Commands

Using Unix Shells

• Command line history and editing
• The Korn and POSIX shells
• The Bash shell
• Command aliasing
• The shell startup file
• Shell environment variables

Redirection, Pipes and Filters

• Standard I/O and redirection
• Pipes
• Command separation
• Conditional execution
• Grouping Commands
• UNIX filters
• The tee command

Backup and Restore Utilities

• Archive devices
• The cpio command
• The tar command
• The dd command
• Exercise: Backing up and restoring files using tar
• Exercise: Backing up and restoring files using cpio

Background job Scheduling

• Starting background jobs
• Background tasks and the nohup command
• Process priorities and the nice command
• Job control
• Scheduling jobs with the at command
• Scheduling jobs with the cron command
• Exercise: Running background jobs

Regular expression Notation

• Regular expressions
• Extended regular expressions

Searching for File Patterns

• The grep family of commands
• The grep command
• The fgrep command
• The egrep command
• Exercises: Search for patterns with grep and egrep

The Stream Editor - sed

• Introduction and command line syntax
• The sed program structure
• sed program processing
• Use sed commands
• sed addresses
• sed instructions
• Hold and get functions
• Advanced flow control
• Exercises: Simple text processing with sed
• Exercises: Create sed scripts to edit files

Commands for Comparing Files

• Compare two files with the cmp command
• Compare two files with the comm command
• Compare two files with the diff and sdiff commands
• Compare large files with the bdiff command
• Exercise: Identifying file differences

File Manipulation Commands

• The head and tail commands
• The cut command
• The paste command
• The pr command
• The split and csplit commands
• Exercises: Manipulate text with cut and paste
• Exercises: Manipulate text with head and tail

Identify and Translate Characters

• od - octal dump
• Use cat to display non-printing characters
• The expand and unexpand commands
• The tr command
• Exercises: Translating text files with tr
• Exercises: Display non-printing characters

Sorting Files

• The sort command
• Specify sort keys with -k
• Sort by column positions
• The uniq command
• Exercises: Sorting text files

Introduction to the Pattern Scanning Utility - awk

• Introduction and command line syntax
• The awk program structure
• Use regular expressions
• Operators
• Simple patterns
• Extended patterns
• Comments
• Special patterns (BEGIN and END)
• Program variables
  • Built-in variables
  • User defined variables
• Mathematical operators
• Enhanced printing
• Handling user variables
• Exercises: Create simple awk scripts
• Exercises: Create a simple awk script using variables

awk Program control structures

• Program control structures
• The if construct
• The while and do ... while constructs
• The basic for construct
• Associative array handling
• Functions
  • Built in functions
  • The system function
  • The getline function
  • User defined functions
• Exercises: Create an awk script using an associative array
• Exercises: Create an awk script using a for loop and if statement
• Exercises: Create an awk script using functions