Errata and Comments for Classic Shell Scripting First printing: May 2005 The authors of the book Classic Shell Scripting carefully prepared Docbook/XML files with the complete text of the book, and believed the material to be free of errors. The realities of commercial book production introduce further automated and manual processing steps between the input XML files and the output printed-and-bound book pages, and these steps provide opportunities for new errors. Tight production schedules that are determined months in advance sharply limit the time for proofreading of nearly-final page galleys, and despite our best efforts, a few errors reported for those galleys were not corrected before the presses rolled. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat Jun 11 08:37:46 2005 Page 46, last line of Table 3.7: Change \' \` to \` \' The buffer beginning is matched by backslash-grave (backslash-left-quote) and the end by backslash-acute (backslash-right-quote). COMMENT: The visual representation of these characters is font dependent, and font designs for screen and print usually differ, so it can be difficult to distinguish between them. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat Jun 11 08:37:46 2005 Page 84, Figure 4-1: The right side of the figure is truncated; that is not the case in the original PostScript file produced by tgrind. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat Jun 11 08:37:46 2005 Page 100, top-of-page example: The display $ iso8859-1-to-html danish Øen med åen lå i læ af én halvø, og én stor ø, langs den græske kyst. should be $ iso8859-1-to-html danish Øen med åen lå i læ af én halvø, og én stor ø, langs den græske kyst. That is, the extra Danish letters that are absent from ASCII should appear as HTML entities of the form &NAME;, rather than as the characters that those entities represent. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat Jun 11 08:37:46 2005 Page 125, sixth line of Table 6-6: -e file file exists. COMMENT: While POSIX (IEEE Std 1003.1 (1988--2004)) requires that the test command support the -e option, some vendor-provided versions that are built-in to the Bourne shell do not recognize this option. Of the many flavors of Unix to which we have access, the only ones that we could find with this misfeature in /bin/sh are Sun Solaris 7, 8, 9, and 10. Presumably the /bin/sh implementations in all older versions of Sun Solaris, and its predecessor SunOS, also fail to support the -e option. By contrast, the /bin/test and /usr/bin/test commands on all our platforms, the /usr/xpg4/bin/sh shell on Sun Solaris, the test utility from GNU coreutils, and the built-in test utilities in bash and zsh all recognize the -e option. All ksh versions that we tested, except those on Hewlett-Packard HP-UX 10 and 11, support the -e option. For portable shell-scripting purposes, in most cases were -e is thought to be required, -d (directory) or -f (file) can be used instead. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat Jun 11 08:45:09 2005 Pages 168--169, Table 7-9. The superscript footnote marker letters "a" in column 1 (under Command) should be daggers, to match the explanation in the middle of the first paragraph of Section 7.9. The entry for ". (dot)" should also have a dagger on it. The description line in column 2 (under Summary) for ". (dot)" should have a superscript footnote marker letter "a", referring to the footnote at the bottom of the table. COMMENT: Table 7-9 was correct in the original DocBook/XML files, but additional errors were introduced in production after the last page galleys were seen by the authors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat Jun 11 08:56:55 2005 Page 372, line 4 from bottom: Change ... display the first tenrecords in the list. to display the first 10 records in the list. COMMENT: The Chicago Manual of Style (15th edition, 2003) in section 9.6, page 381, recommends spelling out only single digit numbers. Our original DocBook/XML files followed that practice, but our "10 records" was incorrectly changed to "tenrecords" after the last page galleys were seen by the authors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat Jun 11 08:37:46 2005 Page 247, three lines from bottom: The ellipsis ... is spaced too tightly: it should be in the same monospaced font as the surrounding text. COMMENT: There are 372 ellipses in the complete text of the book, so it is likely that there are other as-yet-unreported font errors for ellipses. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat Jun 11 08:37:46 2005 Page 499, line above "print spooler" in column 1: The ellipsis ... is spaced too tightly: it should be in the same monospaced font as the preceding text. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Sat Jun 11 09:06:04 2005 Page 482, item 1 in "O'Reilly books" section 1. Learning the bash Shell, Second Edition, Cameron Newham and Bill Rosenblatt. O'Reilly & Associates, Sebastopol, CA, U.S.A., 1998. ISBN 1-56592-347-2. COMMENT: After Classic Shell Scripting went to production, a new edition of that book appeared: @Book{Newham:2005:LBS, author = "Cameron Newham and Bill Rosenblatt", title = "Learning the bash shell", publisher = "O'Reilly", address = "Sebastopol, CA, USA", edition = "Third", pages = "xvi + 333", year = "2005", ISBN = "0-596-00965-8 (paperback)", bibdate = "Sat Jun 11 09:10:15 MDT 2005", price = "\pounds 24.95", acknowledgement = ack-nhfb, subject = "Programming (Electronic computers); UNIX device drivers (Computer programs)", } This is likely to happen with a few other books that we cited, so we don't consider it an erratum, but we are willing to note here the existence of newer editions.