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1 Overview of the package

This document describes version 3.0.0-devel.0 of MBFL, a library of functions for the GNU Bash shell. This package is an attempt to make GNU Bash a viable solution for medium sized scripts; it needs at least Bash version 4.3. A set of modules implementing common operations and a script template are offered by this package and the author has used them with success in implementing non–small scripts.

The philosophy of MBFL is to do the work as much as possible without external commands. For example: string manipulation is done using the special variable substitution provided by Bash, and no use is done of utilities like sed, grep and ed.

The library is better used starting from the template scripts in the examples/ subdirectory of the distribution, especially template.sh and template-actions.sh. This is because, with MBFL, some choices are made to reduce the application–dependent part of the script to the smallest dimension; if we follow another schema, MBFL modules may be inadequate. This is especially true for the options parsing module.

Starting with version 3: this package installs files under directories without the version part. If we desire to install multiple versions of the package: we should install under /opt/mbfl/$(VERSION), by using the appropriate command line option at configuration time:

$ ./configure \
      --prefix=/opt/mbfl/3.0.0 \
      --libdir=/opt/mbfl/3.0.0/lib64

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This document describes version 3.0.0-devel.0 of Marcos Bash Functions Library.