Chapter 3. Solaris Shells and Variables

A thorough understanding of the shell and shell programming is a must for any system administrator. System administrators must be able to read and write shell programs because many tasks can and should be automated by using such scripts. An advantage of using a script or shell program to perform a particular task is that doing so ensures consistency—in other words, the task is performed the same way each time. Also many software products come with installation scripts that have to be modified for your system before they will work. This chapter first introduces some shell basics, and then it describes some fundamentals of creating a shell script.