Code Examples

This tutorial is full of examples of shell commands and programs that are designed to be useful in your everyday life as a user, not just to illustrate the feature being explained. In Basic Shell Developing and onwards, we include various developing problems, which we call tasks, that illustrate particular shell developing concepts. Some tasks have solutions that are refined in subsequent chapters. The later chapters also include developing exercises, many of which build on the tasks in the chapter.

You should feel free to use any code you see in this tutorial and to pass it along to friends and colleagues. We especially encourage you to modify and enhance it yourself.

If you want to try examples but you don't use the Korn shell as your login shell, you must put the following line at the top of each shell script:

#!/bin/ksh

If your Korn shell isn't installed as the file /bin/ksh, substitute its pathname in the above.