Classic Shell Scripting - Arnold Robbins [11]
The system's documentation, while generally complete, was often terse and minimalistic. This made the system more difficult to learn than was really desirable.[3]
Most of what we present in this book centers around processing and manipulation of textual, not binary, data. This stems from the strong interest in text processing that existed during Unix's early growth, but is valuable for other reasons as well (which we discuss shortly). In fact, the first production use of a Unix system was doing text processing and formatting in the Bell Labs Patent Department.
The original Unix machines (Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11s) weren't capable of running large programs. To accomplish a complex task, you had to break it down into smaller tasks and have a separate program for each smaller task. Certain common tasks (extracting fields from lines, making substitutions in text, etc.) were common to many larger projects, so they became standard tools. This was eventually recognized as being a good thing in its own right: the lack of a large address space led to smaller, simpler, more focused programs.
Many people were working semi-independently on Unix, reimplementing each other's programs. Between version differences and no need to standardize, a lot of the common tools diverged. For example, grep on one system used -i to mean "ignore case when searching," and it used -y on another variant to mean the same thing! This sort of thing happened with multiple utilities, not just a few. The common small utilities were named the same, but shell programs written for the utilities in one version of Unix probably wouldn't run unchanged on another.
Eventually the need for a common set of standardized tools and options became clear. The POSIX standards were the result. The current standard, IEEE Std. 1003.1-2004, encompasses both the C library level, and the shell language and system utilities and their options.
The good news is that the standardization effort paid off. Modern commercial Unix systems, as well as freely available workalikes such as GNU/Linux and BSD-derived systems, are all POSIX-compliant. This makes learning Unix easier, and makes it possible to write portable shell scripts. (However, do take note of Chapter 14.)
Interestingly enough, POSIX wasn't the only Unix standardization effort. In particular, an initially European group of computer manufacturers, named X/Open, produced its own set of standards. The most popular was XPG4 (X/Open Portability Guide, Fourth Edition), which first appeared in 1988. There was also an XPG5, more widely known as the UNIX 98 standard, or as the "Single UNIX Specification." XPG5 largely included POSIX as a subset, and was also quite influential.[4]
The XPG standards were perhaps less rigorous in their language, but covered a broader base, formally documenting a wider range of existing practice among Unix systems. (The goal for POSIX was to make a standard formal enough to be used as a guide to implementation from scratch, even on non-Unix platforms. As a result, many features common on Unix systems were initially excluded from the POSIX standards.) The 2001 POSIX standard does double duty as XPG6 by including the X/Open System Interface Extension (or XSI, for short). This is a formal extension to the base POSIX standard, which documents attributes that make a system not only POSIX-compliant, but also XSI-compliant. Thus, there is now only one formal standards document that implementors and application writers need refer to. (Not surprisingly, this is called the Single Unix Standard.)
Throughout this book, we focus on the shell language and Unix utilities as defined by the POSIX standard. Where it's important, we'll include features that are XSI-specific as well, since it is likely that you'll be able to use them too.
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[1] The name has changed at least once since then. We use the informal name