Hi, Like I said before, I don't do my scripting in bash, but in perl. There are 2 books that I find indispensible; namely: Programming Perl by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen & Randal L. Scwartz (O'Reilly ISBN 1-56592-149-6) Perl Black Book by Steven Holzner (CoriolisOpen Press ISBN 1-57610-465-6) I also do a lot of programming with databases, and for that I find Programming the Perl DBI by Alligator Descartes & Tim Bunce (O'Reilly ISBN 1-56592-699-4) very helpful. If you are going to go with just one book, most people would tell you the Programming Perl (camel book) from O'Reilly, because one of the credits for authors is Larry Wall, but I would suggest you go with th Perl Black Book; it is 1282 pages (!!!) long, and has a LOT of VERY USEFUL examples, that are in fact full programs, covering everything from basic file handling, to sysadmin work, to advanced socket programming (a working e-mail client and irc chat server & client for example) and A LOT MORE. I find that the camel book is pretty much just a printed copy of the "perldoc" POD pages (which are included with every perl distribution, with a tiny bit of chit chat in between, whereas the Black Book has all that, as well as the tons of examples, and very helpful commentary. I know this is starting to sound like an info-mercial, so I am going to stop at that. BUT, if you ARE looking into scripting, DO SERIOUSLY consider perl as an alternative to shell (bash/sh/csh) scripting, not only do I (and MANY other people) feel that it is FAR superior, it is also, for the most part, VERY portable... Anyways, HTH, David Charles On Sun, 16 Sep 2001, bascule wrote: > hi, thanks to all for your replies, i understand the principle if IFS if not > the implementation jipe! and your addition below david explains all the 'bad > interpreter' errors! all said i can see that my only book on shell > programming is woefully basic, so, i went into waterstones today to see what > they had, not a lot, and my acid test of looking IFS up in the index to see > what it could tell me failed in all of them, i was rather hoping there would > be an o'reilly book but i couldn't find one, what would people recommend? > amazon list an o'reilly book devoted just to bash, can one fill a book about > bash without discussing a lot about programming? would this be a good choice? > > i welcome peoples advice on reading matter, online docs are all very well but > i do like a proper book and also i can take a book to work but not my > computer! > > bascule > > On Saturday 15 September 2001 6:39 am, you wrote: > > Hi, > > > > I forgot to add, you have to put: > > > > #!/path/to/perl > > > > as the first line of the script I posted; (on standard mandrake 8 install, > > that would be #!/usr/bin/perl) �also "chmod +x scriptname" without quotes. > > > > David Charles > >
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