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Are you looking to sharpen your Shell Scripting chops? Then you may be interested in the BSDCan Shell Scripting Tutorial for Beginners and Sysadmins with Mathias Eggers.

Anyone who works with BSD and other Unix- and Linux-like systems will sooner or later have to deal with the shell and shell scripts, e.g. automation of repetitive task or starting services in /etc/rc.d. Understanding scripts and how to meaningfully extend or rewrite them is the goal of this tutorial, which is mainly designed for beginners and sysadmins.

Simple shell scripts often consist of a sequence of arbitrary shell commands executed in a specific order to achieve a particular purpose. This is where the tutorial will begin, and I will then walk participants through the other components of a script using examples:

Variables

Sourcing

Control structures

Loops

In- and output redirection

Parameters and options

Functions

Testing scripts

From the tutorial the participants will get an impression of what could be achieved with the well-equipped toolbox the shell provides and use that knowledge for creating own scripts for their projects.

Participants should bring their own machines to try out the examples. I encourage everybody to ask questions and bring examples or problems from their daily work to the tutorial to foster a vivid discussion.

I've been writing shell scripts as part of my work since I got in contact with Unix in 1993 and have been teaching shell programming to apprentices for over ten years. This tutorial will be a shortened and in regards to rc-scripts extended version of that one-week course.

https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/timetable/timetable-Shell-Scripting-Tutorial.html

You can register for this tutorial and the BSDCan conference here:

https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/registration.html

If you register before May 1st, you can take advantage of the free reception on Saturday!

#runbsd #runsh #sh #bsdcan #shellscript #Unix