I am looking for a version of Linux that I can practice my scripting skills on. Currently, I support a massive system running on AIX. I want to do more with awk, sed, grep, and even perl. I am looking for something I can throw on a VM on my personal laptop and mess around with.
I have a virtual AIX session because I am an IBM partner, but that expires every two weeks unless I request an extension, which can be a pain.. but if I need to do it, that's fine too.
Another thing- This application runs on AIX, RHEL, or SLEL. I have looked for cloud hosting for AIX and it is very expensive as I am sure you all know, even for a miniscule instance that will have next to no traffic and minimal disk space. Haven't had luck with RHEL or SLEL hosting either. I have a dev environment running AIX that is obviously for DEV environments, but I am still cautious about messing something up!
You don't need a $50,000 subscription to learn sed/awk/grep - these standard UNIX tools are found in just about anything. I'm not sure you even need another operating system. For a gentle start with no installation, you could look into busybox-win32.
Run busybox.exe sh from a cmd prompt, and you're in a Bourne shell which supports all those commands natively, including a basic 'vi' editor to build your scripts in.
The commands in this usually only support the basic arguments, not the fancy GNU ones you might use by accident and realize don't work on AIX.
If you are working on AIXyour system default shell is ksh (ksh88 to be precise). On most Linux systems it is bash though, which is almost the same as the Korn shell, but not quite. You might want to install a ksh (actually ksh93) and use this for your scripting if you set up a Linux as a learning environment.
Busybox is perhaps the quickest way to get a UNIX-like system running, but you can also install Linux into a virtual machine on your (Windoze-)-PC. 2GB RAM is probably all that is needed.
For books about shell programming I'd like to suggest two which i found informative yet great fun to read:
Barry Rosenberg: Hands-On KornShell93 Programming
Dale Dougherty: sed & awk (O'Reilly)
If you want to know what the absolute limits of shell-programming are (like i have a form in this file and i want to fill it automatically with the information from this file to produce a stream of filled forms ...) i suggest - here's the boss cooking himself and he is not shy of spicing it up -
