I have spent a really big chunk of my career writing Bourne shell scripts.

Everything from systems scripting back when I was a sysadmin to product kernel tuning and installation scripts through all my years in industry, I’ve probably written hundreds of thousands of lines of shell script through the years.

if UNIX is at all a part of your work or personal life, you owe it to yourself to become familiar with shell scripting.

In the job I had before this one, I spent probably 4 of my 5 year tenure there maintaining an installer for their UNIX product suite written in several thousand lines of insanely hairy Bourne shell code.

If you are trying to decide which shell to use for your scripts – let me advise that you AVOID the C shell and its derivatives (like TCSH, etc) like the black plague. For an excellent write up on why please see csh.whynot – available here – http://sysunconfig.net/unixtips/csh.html

My favorite book on shell scripting and UNIX administrivia in general is UNIX Power Tools by Peek, OReilly, and Loukides. It contains fairly explicit fixes for all the very common gotchas (Like the quirky ‘test’ command and other such things.)

For interactive use, I’d like to recommend zsh. It’s an incredibly powerful shell with good documentation and an active user community. Get more info at http://www.zsh.org

Good luck and feel free to drop me a line if I can be of help beyond the basic FAQs :)