Chapter 7. WEB AND INTERNET USERS

One area where Unix really shines is the Internet. Whether it's running a fast server from under your desk or simply surfing the Web intelligently and efficiently, there's precious little you can't embed in a shell script when it comes to Internet interaction.

Internet tools are scriptable, even though you might never have thought of them that way. For example, ftp, a program that is perpetually trapped in debug mode, can be scripted in some very interesting ways, as is explored in Script #59. It's not universally true, but shell scripting can improve the performance and output of most command-line utilities that work with some facet of the Internet.