9 Writing Your Own
Shell Scripts

One of the key factors in the design of Razor is its utilization of simple ASCII files as the underlying database (as opposed to a relational/SQL database). By staying "close to UNIX," users can more easily tap into the wealth of existing tools and skill sets on the market rather than learning and relying on yet another 3rd party system.

Before being able to write effective and useful scripts, it is of course, important to have a working familiarity with how the Razor database is organized. A detailed discussion of the directory structure and database file syntax is provided in the Appendices of this manual for your reference.

NOTE: Typically when writing scripts, temporary files are created or need to be created. Ensure that you refer to the Razor-defined RAZOR_TMP environment variable in your scripts for all references to temporary directories.

Razor comes with some excellent examples "out of the box". Look in the directory $RAZOR_HOME/examples for some examples, sample scripts, pearls of wisdom, etc. A README file in this directory contains a list of all of the example files and a short description of their usage. With each new release of Razor, the examples are updated and enhanced, so it makes this a rich source of examples.

This chapter discusses several points that will help you understand and write shell scripts which can expand the functionality of the Razor tool suite.

(Part 1 of 13 for this section) (Generated 09/13/99 at 18:14:47)