Journal of Advances in Shell Programming

Journal of Advances in Shell Programming  [2395-6690(e)] is a peer-reviewed hybrid open-access journal launched in 2014 advanced in shell programming especially to develop skills required for automation in UNIX /Linux environment. This journal focuses on the basis and intermediate level of scripting. It provides training with hands-on sessions to administer the Unix shell and shell programming

• Shell languages and semantics: formal and operational semantics of POSIX and non-POSIX shells, comparison across shell implementations, portability and compatibility analysis, quoting, expansion, and word splitting behaviour, exit status and error propagation models, and design of new or extended shell languages.
• Script engineering and quality: structuring and modularising large scripts, error handling and defensive scripting practice, testing frameworks for shell code, static analysis and linting, code review practice for scripts, maintainability and readability of script codebases, and migration between shell and general-purpose languages.
• Scripting languages for systems automation: comparative evaluation of shell, Python, Perl, Ruby, and PowerShell in automation roles, interoperability and invocation between scripting layers, performance characterisation of scripted workflows, and selection criteria for automation language choice.
• Text processing and data manipulation: regular expression engines and pattern matching in shell contexts, stream editing and field processing tools, structured data handling in pipelines including JSON and YAML, log parsing and extraction, and performance of text processing at scale.
• Command-line interface design and tooling: CLI argument and subcommand design, usability and discoverability of command-line tools, shell completion and interactive features, terminal and pseudo-terminal behaviour, remote session and multiplexing tools, and empirical studies of practitioner tool use.
• System administration automation: user, group, and permission management, package and dependency automation, service and daemon lifecycle scripting, filesystem and storage administration, backup, restore, and recovery automation, and runbook design and operational procedure encoding.
• Configuration management and infrastructure as code: declarative configuration and convergence models, idempotency in automation scripts, configuration drift detection and remediation, provisioning across heterogeneous environments, and testing and validation of infrastructure automation.
• Build, packaging, and deployment scripting: build automation and reproducibility, packaging for distribution across platforms, release and deployment scripting, rollback and recovery automation, environment parity between development and production, and continuous integration pipeline construction.
• Scripting in container and cloud environments: entrypoint and initialisation scripting for containers, image build scripting and layer optimisation, orchestration hooks and lifecycle scripts, cloud provider CLI automation, and portability of automation across cloud and on-premises environments.
• Job scheduling and workflow automation: cron and systemd timer design, batch job orchestration and dependency management, workflow definition and execution engines, retry and failure handling in scheduled automation, and coordination across distributed job execution.
• Monitoring, logging, and diagnostic scripting: instrumentation and metric collection scripts, log rotation and processing pipelines, health check and probe design, automated diagnostic and triage scripts, and alerting logic implemented in scripted form.
• Security and compliance automation: system hardening and baseline enforcement scripts, secrets handling in automation, privilege management and safe use of elevated execution, automated auditing and compliance checking, injection and quoting vulnerabilities in scripts, and supply chain integrity in automated pipelines.
• High-performance and cluster environments: cluster provisioning and node configuration scripting, batch scheduler job scripts and submission automation, environment and module management for scientific computing, parallel execution from shell contexts, and automation of large-scale computational workflows.
• Empirical studies of scripting practice: mining and analysis of shell scripts in public repositories, defect and vulnerability patterns in scripts, adoption of automation tooling in organisations, developer and administrator workflow studies, and datasets and corpora for scripting research.