How this book is organized

This book, which is divided into three sections, is designed to lead you through the workings of the SCO OpenServer Operating System, from using its office automation facilities to set up your calendar, to writing simple shell scripts that perform tasks for you.

Office automation

The SCO OpenServer system contains a number of powerful office automation tools that allow you to manage your work. ``Using SCO Shell'' contains a guide to using the SCO OpenServer office automation tools. ``SCO Shell accessories'' explains how to use the Calendar and Calculator accessories provided with the SCO Shell.

Working at the shell prompt

The shells are powerful programs that you can use to issue commands directly to the SCO OpenServer system. The chapters in this section, beginning with ``Working with files and directories'', introduce you to the shells and explain how to use them to run a variety of programs which are present on your system. This section also explains the basic concepts of file storage and manipulation, and how to manage your work environment effectively.

Shell programming

The three available shells provide a powerful but simple programming language that you can use to automate complex tasks, write your own commands, and connect other programs together to perform a sequence of operations. This section contains the following chapters:

• ``Configuring and working with the shells'', -- an explanation of the different shells you may be working in, and their special features

• ``Automating frequent tasks'' -- examples and explanations of how to write simple scripts

• ``Regular expressions'' -- the extensive pattern matching facilities that these tools use to identify data

• ``Using awk'' -- a powerful but complex tool provided for manipulating and reporting on textual data)

• ``Manipulating text with sed'' -- a stream editor, used for rapidly making changes to large files

Appendices

The following appendices are provided:

• ``An overview of the system'' contains useful background material for the main text. It explains the basic history and design philosophy of the SCO OpenServer system; what its components are, what they do, and how they all work together to provide your work environment.

• ``vi commands'' provides a concise listing of the commands recognized by the vi text editor.

• ``DOS command equivalents'' provides a table showing common MS-DOS^® commands and their SCO OpenServer system equivalents.

• ``Sample shell startup files'' contains some sample listings and explanations of the standard user shell startup files.

• ``Further reading'' contains references to sources of further information that lie beyond the scope of this book.