Shell Programming and Scripting

I've figured out bash scripting, but now want to make the same functionality in C++, does anyone know a good tutorial for writing bash script equivalents in C++?

If by 'bash equivalents' you mean ls or cat?
You have two choices:

Easy:
1. call popen() to run a script or command, or possibly use system() (or fork/exec/wait)
Hard:
2. Learn a major part of 'Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment' by Richard Stevens. My 2nd Edition (Rago) has > 1000 pages. For example, an ls equivalent could easily work out to several hundred lines of C/C++

Are you trying to write your own shell? If so, there is a book that develops a lite shell and covers a subset of Stevens book: 'Linux Application Development' - Troan & Johnson

more specifically what I'm wanting to do is things like the equivalent of

grep -$switches '$location_file' ./$starting_point

in C++, so basically write a bunch of different command line bash wrappers and feed variables to them/get output from them and do stuff with it, i.e. >> somefile.txt

I'm just trying to learn how C++ could run the utility scripts I've built over time to do various sysadmin stuff, then I'm going to write stuff for various API's, snort rules, etc. but I have to start somewhere. I've read a tutorial on C++, but it went into depth on things I'm not sure I need for my purposes.