bash Books

bash Idioms

bash Idioms is an intermediate to advanced discussion of deciphering old bash code and writing clear and readable new code, with examples, templates and a style guide.

bash Cookbook

The bash Cookbook is part of O'Reilly's cookbook series, and with example code on Github.

Companion Website

We created a Website for All Things Bash for the cookbook. Among other things, it indexes a lot of great material from the bash source code that most people never see.

Also, check out Learning the bash Shell, Third Edition by our co-author Cameron Newham. Other bash related titles from O'Reilly include bash Quick Reference, and Classic Shell Scripting: Hidden Commands that Unlock the Power of Unix. Java™ Application Development on Linux®.

My other co-author. Carl Albing, also wrote

Official GNU and Maintainer Resources

Other Resources

O'Reilly's bash Idioms
- Idioms example code, templates, and style guide
O'Reilly's bash Cookbook
- Cookbook example code
- A Website for All Things Bash
O'Reilly's Learning the bash Shell, Third Edition
O'Reilly's bash Quick Reference
O'Reilly's Classic Shell Scripting
Bash Guide for Beginners
Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide (current, excellent)
Bash Prompt HOWTO (old)
BASH Programming - Introduction HOW-TO (old)

Site

In September 2003 I redesigned the site format, for the fourth time if I remember correctly. I hope this format will be more simple, and easier to navigate and maintain. (UPDATE: 2006-07-27: But I doubt it is. I'll be re-designing again, using a real CMS this time, Real Soon Now.

If you are looking for an excellent ISP, I can strongly recommend Speakeasy, who has been nothing but awesome. Until 2002 Netaxs (now defunct) had the edge with raw technical talent, but Speakeasy has them beat with shear ease of use (web-based tools) and they've only improved since them.

I also want to mention that when moving the site locally, I had a challenge for secondary DNS. To wit, I don't have one. A moment's search on Google turned up XName.org and I'm happy to say I can also highly recommend them. Within 10 minutes I'd created a free account, configured my local DNS to allow zone transfers, created a zone, populated it and just plain had everything working. Awesome.

The domain name is a play on words, because I couldn't think of a more creative one. I kept asking my wife (who is far more creative than I) what my domain name should be. I suspect she got sick of me asking, and this is the result.

This is my personal site and does not represent the opinions of my employer.

The major navigation sections are as follows:

Karen: Karen's interests
JP: JP's interests, publications, etc.
Photos: Take a guess...
Security: Information Security Resources
Source: Various code, most of which written by me
Networking: Some stuff that didn't fit anywhere else
Linux: Linux Tools and Resources
Windows: Windows Tools and Resources

As a general rule, links to other pages within this site will open in the same browser window and external sites will open in a new browser window. External sites will also be in italics.

If you have any comments about the site, additions to my tools pages, or if you find something broken, please Email me.

This site was created and is maintained using GenSite.pl, a simple Perl script I wrote to implement a template-based site. This was needed to achieve my goal of getting rid of all the JavaScript, frames and other junk and am using nothing but HTML with CSS and nested tables. I use a simple text editor to edit templates files, then run my script to regenerate the entire site, including navigation menus, in seconds.

I made a conscious decision to stay as simple as possible while still being usable and useful, and while still leaving display choices up the the viewer. One of the things that bothers me quite a lot of badly designed site that force you to view them in a certain window size. If I wanted to see my web sites in 800x600, I would not have a 20 inch monitor! Thus this site allows you to view in any window and font size your browser permits.

That also raises the question of line length. One of the reason many annoying sites force a window size is to gain more control over formatting, particularly graphics layout and line length. Lines that are to long are more tiring to read. This site has a very simple solution. Resize your browser window to any line length you find comfortable. Try adjusting your font size while you are at it.

I found the following helpful in this redesign:

The HTML Code Tutorial
The Web Style Guide, 2nd edition
CSS Reference Table
ESR's site design notes
The W3C MarkUp Validation Service and W3C CSS Validation Service. In fact, all the HTML and CSS code should be (mostly) valid, even though I did not mark every page.

A some point I am going to switch to some Open Source CMS or other, but until then this works well enough.