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Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2011 10:40:40 -0400 (EDT)
From: doug <doug@fledge.watson.org>
To: Mark Moellering <mark@msen.com>
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Cc: FreeBSD <freebsd-questions@freebsd.org>
Subject: Re: Book recommendations (slightly OT)
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On Tue, 26 Jul 2011, Mark Moellering wrote:

> I want to automate some tasks, creating directories, file editing, etc.  I 
> was going to pick up a book on shell scripting but wanted to ask the list if;
> A) I am barking up the wrong tree and should use something else.
> B) If I am headed in the right direction, what is the best book / resource to 
> use?
>
> Thanks in advance
>
> Mark Moellering

I second Matthew's sh recommendation. Doing admin stuff is much much easier if 
you learn the basics of regular expressions, awk, sed and xargs. Also find. The 
daily jobs and the scripts in /etc have lots of coding examples. Of course 
mergermaster and portmaster are the king and queen of sh scripts. Google will 
yield thousands of simple examples of all the above and more.

If you are doing lexical stuff perl is hard to beat.