AIX Advanced Shell Programming Tools

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

Objectives

To provide the knowledge and skills to make effective use of a wide range of standard AIX programming and development tools.

Course Contents

Course Introduction

• Administration and Course Materials

• Course Structure and Agenda

• Delegate and Trainer Introductions

Session 1: BACKUP AND RESTORE UTILITIES

• The tar command

• Compression utilities gzip, bzip2, zip and compress

• Exercise: Backing up and restoring files using tar

• Exercises: Compressing files

Session 2: BACKGROUND JOB SCHEDULING

• Scheduling jobs with the cron command

• Scheduling jobs with the at command

• Exercises: Running background jobs

Session 3: 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

• Exercises: Identifying file differences

Session 4: SPLITTING FILES

• The split and csplit commands

• Exercises: Splitting files

Session 5: IDENTIFYING AND TRANSLATING CHARACTERS

• od - octal dump

• Use cat to display non-printing characters

• The expand and unexpand commands to convert between tab and space characters

• The tr command for character translation

• Exercises: Translating characters with tr

Session 6: REGULAR EXPRESSION NOTATION REVIEW

• Standard regular expressions

• Extended regular expressions

Session 7: THE STREAM EDITOR - sed

• sed command line syntax

• sed command processing

• Pattern space

• sed addresses

• sed commands

• Hold and get functions

• Advanced flow control

• Exercises: Text processing with sed

Session 8: INTRODUCTION TO THE PATTERN SCANNING UTILITY - awk

• Introduction and command line syntax

• The awk program structure

• Operators

• Simple patterns

• Extended patterns

• Special patterns (BEGIN and END)

• Program variables: Built-in variables, User defined variables, Arrays

• Mathematical operators

• Displaying output with print and printf

• Exercises: Create awk scripts to extract selected data from a file and generate reports

Session 9: awk PROGRAM CONTROL STRUCTURES

• Program control structures

• The if construct

• The while and do ... while constructs

• The basic for construct

• Associative array handling

• Functions: Mathematical and string functions, The system function, The getline function, User defined functions

• Exercises: Create an awk script using an program control structures and arrays

Session 10: awk DEBUGGING AWK SCRIPTS

• Responding to Syntax errors

• Responding to Logical errors

Session 11: MISCELLANEOUS TOOLS

• bc (calculator)

• fuser (testing for files in use)

• getops (checking options passed to shell scripts)

• printf (formatting screen output)

• logger (script logging)

• xargs (generating arguments for a command)

• eval (re-evaluating variables)

• Exercises: Using tools within a shell script