Appendix P. Revision History

  This document first appeared as a 60-page HOWTO in the late spring  of 2000. Since then, it has gone through quite a number of updates  and revisions. This book could not have been written without the  assistance of the Linux community, and especially of the volunteers  of the Linux Documentation Project. 

From [email protected] Sat Jun 10 09:05:33 2000 -0700Date: Sat, 10 Jun 2000 09:05:28 -0700 (MST)From: "M. Leo Cooper" <[email protected]>X-Sender: thegrendel@localhostTo: [email protected]: Permission to submit HOWTODear HOWTO Coordinator,I am working on and would like to submit to the LDP a HOWTO on the subjectof "Bash Scripting" (shell scripting, using 'bash'). As it happens,I have been writing this document, off and on, for about the last eightmonths or so, and I could produce a first draft in ASCII text format ina matter of just a few more days.I began writing this out of frustration at being unable to find adecent book on shell scripting. I managed to locate some pretty goodarticles on various aspects of scripting, but nothing like a complete,beginning-to-end tutorial.  Well, in keeping with my philosophy, if allelse fails, do it yourself.As it stands, this proposed "Bash-Scripting HOWTO" would serve as acombination tutorial and reference, with the heavier emphasis on thetutorial. It assumes Linux experience, but only a very basic levelof programming skills. Interspersed with the text are 79 illustrativeexample scripts of varying complexity, all liberally commented. Thereare even exercises for the reader.At this stage, I'm up to 18,000+ words (124k), and that's over 50 pages oftext (whew!).I haven't mentioned that I've previously authored an LDP HOWTO, the"Software-Building HOWTO", which I wrote in Linuxdoc/SGML. I don't knowif I could handle Docbook/SGML, and I'm glad you have volunteers to dothe conversion. You people seem to have gotten on a more organized basisthese last few months. Working with Greg Hankins and Tim Bynum was nice,but a professional team is even nicer.Anyhow, please advise.Mendel [email protected]