Shell script

A shell script is a script written for the shell, or command line interpreter, of an operating system. It is often considered a simple domain-specific programming language. Typical operations performed by shell scripts include file manipulation, program execution, and printing text.

Many shell script interpreters double as command line interface, such as the various Unix shells, Windows PowerShell or the MS-DOS COMMAND.COM. Others, such as AppleScript or the graphical Windows Script Host (WScript.exe), add scripting capability to computing environments without requiring a command line interface. Other examples of programming languages primarily intended for shell scripting include DCL and JCL.

Shortcuts

In their most basic form, a shell script can provide a convenient variation of a system command where special environment settings, command options, or postprocessing is applied automatically, but in a way that allows the new script to still act as a fully normal Unix command.

One example would be to create a version of ls, the command to list files, giving it a shorter command name of l, which would be normal saved in a user's bin directory as /home/username/bin/l, and a default set of command options pre-supplied.

#!/bin/sh
LC_COLLATE=C ls -FCas "$@"

Here, The first line indicates what interpreter should be used to execute the rest of the script, and the second line makes a listing with options for file format indicators, columns, all files (none omitted), and a size in blocks. The LC_COLLATE=C set the default collation order to not fold upper and lower case together, and the "$@" causes any parameters given to l to be passed through as parameters to ls, so that all of the normal options and other syntax known to ls can still be used.

The user would then be able to simply use l for the most commonly used short listing.
Batch jobs
Shell scripts allow several commands that would be entered manually at a command line interface to be executed automatically, and without having to wait for a user to trigger each stage of the sequence. For example, in a directory with three C source code files, rather than manually running the four commands required to build the final program from them, one could instead create a C shell script, here named build and kept in the directory with them, which would compile them automatically:

#!/bin/csh
echo compiling...
cc -c foo.c
cc -c bar.c
cc -c qux.c
cc -o myprog foo.o bar.o qux.o
echo done.

The script would allow a user to save the file being edited, pause the editor, and then just run ./build to create the updated program, test it, and then return to the editor. Since the 1980s or so, however, scripts of this type have been replaced with utilities like make which are specialized for building programs.