Chapter 3. CREATING UTILITIES

In many ways, the main purpose of scripting in command shells is to take complex command-line scripts and drop them into files, making the scripts replicable and easily tweaked and tuned to fit specific purposes. It should be no surprise, then, that user commands sprawl across two chapters in Wicked Cool Shell Scripts. What's surprising is that I haven't written a wrapper for, or otherwise tweaked and tuned the behavior of, every single command on my Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X systems.

Which leads to a very interesting observation about the power and flexibility of Unix. Unix is the only major operating system where you can decide that you don't like the default flags of a command and fix them forever with just a few keystrokes, or where you can emulate the behavior of your favorite utility from another version of the operating system with a dozen lines of scripting. That's what makes Unix so tremendously fun and what provoked the creation of this book in the first place.