diff --git src/main/docbkx/ops_mgt.xml src/main/docbkx/ops_mgt.xml
index eb5c98c..7b28256 100644
--- src/main/docbkx/ops_mgt.xml
+++ src/main/docbkx/ops_mgt.xml
@@ -1702,6 +1702,40 @@ false
$ ./bin/hbase shell
hbase> snapshot 'myTable', 'myTableSnapshot-122112'
+
+ Take a Snapshot From a Bash Script
+ To take a snapshot from a Bash script, use HBase Shell's non-interactive mode
+ ( or ). If the snapshot is
+ successful, the command will return 0. Hoswever, a non-zero value is not necessarily
+ indicative of failure. For instance, the snapshot may succeed but the client loses network
+ connection, which would look like a failure to the client. The only way to definitively
+ know that a snapshot failed is to check whether it exists. Following is a simple
+ (non-robust) example script to take a snapshot.
+
+#!/bin/bash
+# Take a snapshot of the table passed as an argument
+
+# Parse the arguments
+if [ -z $1 ]||[$1 == '-h' ]; then
+ echo "Usage: $0 <table>"
+ echo " $0 -h"
+ exit 1
+fi
+
+export HBASE_PATH=/home/user/git/hbase
+export DATE=`date +"%Y%m%d"`
+echo "snapshot '$1', 'snapshot-$DATE'" | $HBASE_PATH/bin/hbase shell -n
+status=$?
+if [$status -ne 0]; then
+ echo "Snapshot may have failed: $status"
+fi
+exit $status
+
+ You could run such a script on a regular basis using a cron or
+ at job, or using another batch scheduler.
+ You can script other snapshot operations as well. For more information about shell
+ scripting with HBase, see .
+