Shell Programming and Scripting

Hey there.

I am a relative rookie when it comes to Linux/Unix Administration and have been learning to adapt my meager coding skill to working with shell scripts in the 'nix realms. I have done some exhausting searches for and found plenty of information on making scripts globally available but cannot seem to find any cohesive best practices. Would anyone here care to take a stab at pointing me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance,
T

Are you talking about deployment of scripts? This is really code managment or playing code librarian. A decent app like Serena allows you to set up complex rules for pushing code into use. There are also some opensource applications for this on sourceforge.net

Best practices for this start with the least privilege principle. Only grant the minimum privilege required and only to those that need it. Same goes for scripts.

It comes down to "keep your stuff obviously yours, and obviously separate". UNIX has many options available for doing so; you can take it as far as you like.

You can keep your scripts in /home/myusername/bin/ and add that to your own PATH ( by modifying ~/.profile or whatever equivalent file your shell uses ) so your scripts are available to your own user without typing the absolute path every time. This is easy, safe, secure, and convenient. You enjoy the effects of having a script installed globally without having to actually do so, letting you modify them without elevated permissions, which greatly reduces your chances of making a system-wrecking mistake or causing confusion with other users.

You also could install in /usr/local/sbin/ instead of /usr/sbin/ to keep your files apart from the system's. /usr/local/ is generally empty and reserved for things like this; you may need to add it to your PATH. If you absolutely must install them globally, this is a bare minimum IMHO.

You could also install into /opt/myapplication like large commercial applications frequently do, keeping your files REALLY far apart from the system stuff. This is probably the best option if you have a really big set of interdependent parts that must be system-global yet kept together in one place. Sets of things like this often have big trees of files under /opt/myapplication, with their own set of PATH's and other variables which must be loaded before the app can be used.

If for some reason I really, really must install into /usr/sbin or what have you, what I do is install into /opt/myappdir anyway, and just make /usr/sbin/myapp a symbolic link to /opt/myappdir/myapp. If I need to find and remove everything belonging to myappdir later, I've at least given myself a straightforward way to do so.

You can even put things in a chroot, isolating your stuff hermetically apart from the rest of the system.

For your purposes as a beginner, the very first option is probably the best, easy and safe and useful.