I just found this great introduction to shell scripting. It’s written by Apple and it’s called Shell Scripting Primer. It starts off by telling you about the different dialects of shell scripting but soon goes into details. Everything is accompanied by clear examples.

What is shell scripting

To understand what shell scripting is, you first need to know what a shell is. The shell is the interface between you and your Operating System. There are graphical shell (think about the windows user interface) and there are command line shells. Shell scripting is the automation of tasks in a shell by writing a script that can be interpreted by the shell.

So why would you need shell scripting

If you are just starting out with websites you probably don’t need shell scripting. You would be better of improving your HTML and CSS skills. If you are getting into the more advanced stuff though, shell scripting can really pay off. It’s not hard to write a simple shell script that automates tasks. If you use a so called scheduler to schedule the running of scripts at specified times, you can for example update your site automatically every x minutes.

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