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• UNIX Power Tools Book (Jerry D. Peek, Tim O'Reilly, Mike Loukides) - Excellent book about UNIX shell scripting with many examples
  • Browse the script directory
  • Archive of all shell scripts (684 KB)
• John Chamber's Script directory (John Chambers) - Large collection of more than 300 good shell scripts, well commented
  • Home directory
• Cameron Simpson's Scripts (Cameron Simpson) - more than 800 shell scripts and perl programs
• ftp.armory.com (John H. DuBois III) - Archive of more than 100 scripts. They tend to be large, but well commented. Some are specific to the SCO UNIX operating system
  • Short descripton of each script
• Daniel E. Singer's scripts (Daniel E. Singer) - Well written system administration and web related scripts
• Steve Kinzler's Home Directory (Steve Kinzler) - more than 180 scripts (shell and perl) simplifying web usage, administration, configuration
• Carlos' Scripts (Carlos J. G. Duarte) - more than 220 useful scripts (shell, awk, perl)
  • Libraries (awk, m4, perl, sh, ...)
  • many templates (awk, script, c, ...)
• GNU shtool (Ralf S. Engelschall) - a collection of useful script functionality (i.e. for software installation) in one script
• Portable Shell Programming: An Extensive Collection of Bourne Shell Examples (Bruce Blinn)
  • Examples from the book (28 KB)
• Unix shell programming notes (Chris F.A. Johnson) - Shell scripts, articles and libraries, e.g. for date manipulation or array handling
  • Date functions
  • Bash array functions
• Unix shell scripts (Paul Dunne) - Page with more than 50 small shell scripts (some from the Unix Power Tools book)
• The tcshrc Project Page (Simos Xenitellis) - a set of advanced startup scripts for the TCSH
• Linux shell scripts, Bash scripting, shell programming (Dawid Michalczyk) - More than 30 shell scripts for different purposes, some of them BASH specific

• [dilbert.sh] CSE80 -- Lecture 4, Apr 25 -- An Example of Shell Script (Bennet Yee) - Extensively explained example script getting the daily "Dilbert" comic via the Web
• ccirc 2.x (Charles Cooke) - IRC client written in KSH scripts
• Sigma Bulletin Board System (Rob DeMarco) - A complete BBS written using shell scripts (26 scripts, 52 KB)

• Typhoon (formerly "Portable Unix Toolkit") (RayCosoft) - a collection of Korn shell scripts and login environment files. A shareware version is available for evaluation purposes

• netcat - create network connections (hobbit@avian.org) - Excellent utility program (written in c) to create TCP or UDP connections using shell scripts. Using this program you can access remote services from shell scripts, or even create servers implemented using shell scripts
  • nc110.tgz (74 KB)
• The GNU Netcat -- Official homepage - GNU Reimplementation of the "netcat" network utility program
• GNU wget - the noninteractive download utility (Hrvoje Niksic) - may be used to download files or web pages from scripts. If you are using Linux, you may already have it in /usr/bin. Solaris 9 users should search in /usr/sfw/bin
  • GNU Wget Manual
  • wget-1.9.tar.gz (1.3 MB)
• ShellCheck online shell script analyzer (Vidar Holen) - Static analysis and linting (problem checking) tool for sh / bash scripts
  • ShellCheck source code, written in Haskell
• KSH debugger (Bill Rosenblatt) - from the book "Learning the Korn Shell" by Bill Rosenblatt. Written in KSH
  • Learning the Korn Shell (Book)
• UNIX Guru Universe (Kirk Waingrow) - many UNIX related programs, some of them are scripts
  • Shell Software - some shell utility programs written in C
• UNIX Guru Universe (Kirk Waingrow) - many UNIX related programs, some of them are scripts
  • Shell Software - some shell utility programs written in C
• pipe_scripting (Oleg Kiselyov) - A tool written in C turning "...any UNIX-interactive application into a server...". I recommend "netcat" for this purpose
• shc-3.2.tgz (16 KB) (Francisco Javier Rosales Garcia) - Converts simple shell scripts to C code, which can be compiled afterwards
• Autoconf - "autoconf" is the system that creates the common "configure" installation and configuration scripts based on M4 macros and shell code. The manual contains a chapter dedicated to portable shell programming, listing many lesser known quirks of different shells on different operating systems
  • autoconf - Portable Shell Programming

• Softpanorama Virtual Library: Open Source Shells Webliography (Nikolai Bezroukov) - a fairly comprehensive collection of shell scripting links. A little hard to read because of large quoted article excerpts
• www.kornshell.com (David G. Korn) - Links to software, documentation, web-resources and books on ksh and ksh93
• Korn Shell Web (kshWeb) (Dana French) - KSH scripts and the "Shell Curses", a curses-like library for korn shell programmers

• Advanced BASH Scripting HOWTO (HTML, current version) (Mendel Leo Cooper) - Excellent, comprehensive introduction to BASH scripting. Many examples. Unfortunately BASH specific parts are not indicated explicitly
  • Advanced Bash Scripting Guide (Paperback book)
• BASH Frequently Asked Questions - Answers to frequently asked BASH questions, but most also apply to other Bourne-Shell compatible shells. This very helpful document is frequently updated by the users of the #BASH channel on irc.freenode.org.
• An introduction to the UNIX Shell (Stephen R. Bourne) - Introduction to the Bourne shell by its inventor
  • text version
  • PostScript (95 kb)
• The Grymoire - home for UNIX wizards (Bruce Barnett) - Excellent resource for UNIX related articles about the shell, awk, sed and more
  • Sh
• Route User's Tutorial and Exposition (Paul Sheer) - Comprehensive introduction to the UNIX environment. Note: shell chapters mix standard and BASH specific features without distinction
  • 20. Advanced Shell Scripting
• A User's Guide to the Z-Shell (Peter Stephenson) - A very extensive tutorial to the ZSH
• Bash by example, Part 1 (Daniel Robbins) - Good, medium-sized BASH tutorial
  • Bash by example, Part 2
  • Bash by example, Part 3
• UNIX Bourne Shell Programming (unknown [Please contact me if you know the author, hs]) - Comprehensive bourne shell scripting tutorial with many examples and excercises
  • Optional Chapter - KornShell Programming
  • Book as ZIP file "shell.zip" (117 KB)
• Bourne Shell Programming (Robert P. Sayle) - many practical examples, not only for system administrators
• Unix shell scripting with sh/ksh (Richard Brittain) - Medium sized introduction to sh/ksh scripting
• Ryan's Bash Scripting Tutorial (Ryan Chadwick) - Introduction to the basic BASH scripting elements. With excercises. Describes the use of tput(1) for formatting script output.
• BashGuide (Greg Wooledge, Maarten Billemont) - BASH tutorial, provided as a Wiki
• Shell Scripts and Awk on the CUED Teaching System (Tim P. Love) - Short introduction into shell programming for UNIX beginners. Note that the referenced shell is the KornShell.
• Bourne Shell Programming - Easy Bourne shell tutorial
• Book: A Scientist's and Engineer's Guide to Workstations and Supercomputers: Coping with Unix, RISC, Vectors, and Programming (Rubin H. Landau, Melanie Johnson, Jon Maestri) - A very gentle approach to lerning UNIX, in many small steps, starting with "Logging In". Based on a book. The "interactive" version even has a terminal window you can enter commands in (did not work for me)

• Shell Command Language Index (The Open Group) - Excellent, detailed and comprehensive reference for the Korn Shell (part of the Single UNIX(R) Specification)
• Bash Reference Manual (Chet Ramey, Brian Fox) - Definite reference for the "Bourne-Again SHell" (BASH)
• Desktop KornShell User's Guide (Sun Microsystems) - Describes the dtksh (a ksh93 with Motif extension)
• User Commands - ksh (Sun Microsystems) - ksh manual page for Solaris 9
• sh manual page (NeoSoft)
  • csh
  • (pd)ksh
  • bash
  • zsh
  • tcsh

• Unix Shell Patterns (James Coplien, Alan Robertson, Gregg Wonderly) - A collection of "...frequent Shell programming problems that often are resolved only with expert insight"
• A survey of UNIX shells (Terry Griffin) - Shortly describes the differences of the most popular shells
• UNIX SHELL Quote Tutorial (Bruce Barnett) - Excellent resource for UNIX related articles about the shell, awk, sed and more
  • Regular Expressions
  • Top Ten Reasons not to use the C shell
• A Guide to Unix Shell Quoting (Uwe Waldmann) - Explanation of the different type of quoting: \ '...',"..."
• SunWorld "Unix 101" Articles (UGU Links) (Mo Budlong) - Good shell script related articles. Take some time to browse them!
  • Command line psychology 101 - How the shell program interprets commands
  • Shell Programming and simple menus (part 1)
  • Shell programming and simple menus (part 2)
  • Using history and command line editing
• Sending email with attachments on UNIX systems - describes how to send email from shell scripts using external programs like "metamail", "mpack", "mutt"
  • Sending files as mail attachments
• Bash Features (Chet Ramey, Brian Fox) - Detailed description of the BASH in comparison with Bourne Shell, C-Shell and Korn Shell
• autoconf - Portable Shell Programming - "autoconf" is the system that creates the common "configure" installation and configuration scripts based on M4 macros and shell code. The manual contains a chapter dedicated to portable shell programming, listing many lesser known quirks of different shells on different operating systems
• Shell Script Porting Guidelines (Raycosoft) - highlights some aspects of portable (ksh) shell scripts
• Toolman's ;login: articles (Daniel E. Singer) - Shell related articles for the ;login: magazine
• Useless Use of Cat Award (Era Eriksson) - Description of the "award" handed out by Randal L. Schwartz in comp.unix.shell
• Shell corner (unixreview.com) (Ed Schaefer) - Shell scripts of different usefulness, with helpful descriptions
• lintsh (Paul Jarc) - Describes unportable shell programming constructs
• The Traditional Bourne Shell Family (Sven Mascheck) - Lists differences of Bourne Shell dialects on many UNIX platforms; helps keeping scripts portable
• Tower Floor -- Shell Scripts (Anthony Thyssen) - Some articles and tips about shell scripting, AWK, sed, ...
• Answerman - Help, I've Fallen (Gary Kline, David Leonard, Dirk Myers) - short, but nice article describing the very first steps to the first own shell scripts
• Using Bash shell scripts for function testing (Angel Rivers) - Describes how to use BASH scripts for testing programs
• Tip: Prompt magic (Daniel Robbins) - Short description of how to customize (e.g. colour) the BASH prompt, and set the xterm title

• Metalab shell binaries for Linux (Metalab) - precompiled binaries for the most common shells, including ash, bash, csh, pdksh, rc, scsh, tcsh, zsh
• Shell source codes (FUNET Archive) - Source code for the following shells: ash, bash, es, esh, ksh, rc, ssh, tcsh, zsh. Some versions (i.e. pdksh) are rather old
• ES - Extensible Shell (Soren Dayton, Paul Haahr, Byron Rakitzis) - A shell derived from the RC shell (the standard Plan9 shell)
• RC - shell (re-implementation) (Byron Rakitzis, Tim Goodwin) - The default shell of the Plan9 operating system

• Awk -- A Pattern Scanning and Processing Language (Alfred V. Aho, Brian W. Kernighan, Peter J. Weinberger) - Introduction to the language by it's authors
• Make -- A Program for Maintaining Computer Programs (Stuard I. Feldman)
• Sed (Bruce Barnett) - Excellent resource for UNIX related articles about the shell, awk, sed and more
  • Awk

• CCsh, the Bourne Shell Compiler (Comeau Computing)

• U/WIN (David G. Korn) - UNIX environment for Windows with many tools, including an implementation of the Korn Shell
• Cygwin (Cygwin Solutions) - GNU development tools for Windows, including UNIX commands and shells like BASH
• djgpp (DJ Delorie) - Port of the GNU C compiler to Windows
• GNU utilities for Win32 (Karl M. Syring) - Ports of some UNIX utilities for WIndows; most notably ZSH

• Hamilton C shell (Nicole Ashley Hamilton) - An implementation of the CSH for Windows. A free demo version is available
• UNIX Shell for Windows - Installer binary (Janotech) - A Unix shell environment, a graphical command line shell, and a C programming library for writing shell scripts for MS Windows

• Csh Programming Considered Harmful (Tom Christiansen) - Famous article with reasons NOT to program using CSH
• KSH-93 Frequently Asked Questions (David G. Korn) - Focuses on the newest version of the Korn Shell language
• UNIX shell differences and how to change your shell (Brian Blackmore) - A brief history of UNIX shells, shell feature comparison, and a small chapter on "how to change your shell"
• comp.unix.shell FAQ (HTML version) (Joe Halpin) - Many answers to shell script related questions. Compared to the Unix FAQ the focus is more on shell scripts than on Unix
• Unix - Frequently Asked Questions (HTML version) (Ted Timar)
• comp.lang.awk FAQ (Russell Schulz) - Describes how to get AWK, online-resources, and answers some actual AWK questions
• comp.unix.shell - This newsgroup is a good place to pose shell questions. Almost all questions are answered
• Internet FAQ Archives (Internet FAQ Consortium) - Official server for Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

• The New KornShell Command And Programming Language (David G. Korn, Morris I.Bolsky) - The definite book on ksh93. Sometimes more a reference than a tutorial
  • Examples from the book
• Shell Scripting Recipes (Chris F.A. Johnson) - A book full of interesting and ready-to-use shell scripts for learning the shell (or just using the scripts)
• Wicked Cool Shell Scripts: 101 Scripts for Linux, OS X, and UNIX Systems, 2nd Edition (Dave Taylor, Brandon Perry)
• Unix Shell Programming (Stephen G. Kochan, Patrick H. Wood)
• Learning the Korn Shell (Bill Rosenblatt)
• Learning the Bash Shell (Bill Rosenblatt)
• Portable Shell Programming: An Extensive Collection of Bourne Shell Examples (Bruce Blinn)
  • Examples from the book (28 KB)
• The Korn Shell: User and Programming Manual (Anatole Olczak)
• Hands-On KornShell 93 Programming (Barry Rosenberg)
• Kornshell Programming Tutorial (Barry Rosenberg)
• Teach Yourself Shell Programming in 24 Hours (Sriranga R. Veeraraghavan)
• The New KornShell Command And Programming Language (David G. Korn, Morris I.Bolsky) - The definite book on ksh93. Sometimes more a reference than a tutorial
  • Examples from the book
• An Introduction to Shell Scripting (Glen Smith) - Teaches how to write shell scripts with many examples that are explained in much detail. Good book for beginners
  • An Introduction to Shell Scripting
• Universal Command Guide: For Operating Systems (Guy Lotgering) - A comprehensive cross-reference of UNIX commands and their options
• UNIX Shells by Example (3rd edition) (Ellie Quigley)
• From Bash to Z Shell (Jerry D. Peek, Peter Stephenson, Oliver Kiddle) - In addition to a basic introduction to shells, the book also covers less well documented parts of the shells, e.g customizing the prompt, binding keys, (tab-) completion (including writing them), writing editor commands, and others
• Advanced Bash Scripting Guide (Paperback book) (Mendel Leo Cooper) - Excellent, comprehensive introduction to BASH scripting. Many examples. Unfortunately BASH specific parts are not indicated explicitly

• Z shell (SunSITE Denmark) - ZSH links, documentation, FAQs
  • Z-Shell Frequently-Asked Questions
• TCSH(1) Manual Page (Dave Schweisguth)
• Csh (Bruce Barnett) - Excellent resource for UNIX related articles about the shell, awk, sed and more
• An Introduction to the C shell (William Joy, National Technical University of Athens - Software Engineering Laboratory) - tutorial by the author of the shell

• Know Your Unix System Administrator -- A Field Guide (Stephan Zielinski) - Funny article about different types of system administrators

Thanks to Brian Hiles <brian_hiles@rocketmail.com> for providing his extensive link collection.

Last recent update: 2018-01-08