And once you understand what is in the language vs an external terminal program in your PATH. Random O'Reilly Linux tutorial? Assumes bash.Ī lot of the illogical things in bash make a lot more sense once you understand its parsing/expansion rules. This epitomizes 'a little knowledge is a dangerous thing'.īash has many cringeworthy aspects, but we have to deal with the world as it is, not the world as we would like it to be, and the reality is that bash is the default shell on 99.9% of unix boxes you encounter - even if you use an alt shell on your machine.Ĭoworkers machine? Bash.

You're going to get a lot of snark from people saying things like 'don't', or 'learn python instead'. You'll get very proficient very quickly by doing that.

The best way you can learn the shell is by using Linux as your primary desktop for at least a few months. A few example: CTRL-l (no need to ever use /usr/bin/clear), CTRL-k, CTRL-u, CTRL-e, CTRL-a, CTRL-w, CTRL-arrow left, CTRL-arrow right, CTRL-r (history reverse search with find as you type autocomplete) * Keyboard shortcuts and how they are useful. * Knowing most of the bash internal variables: * All of test(1) as you can use them in any if statement (/usr/bin/[ is a real command!): That being said, a few of my personal favorites to memorize: I did it for an hour or so a night for a week or so. I also took some cliff notes for things that seemed generally useful. I found that it improved by bash-foo 100x simply by knowing about so many of the utilities.

As silly as it sounds, when I was a new Unix SysAdmin, I read the entirety of 'man 1 bash', which includes all bash builtins.

Autoprompt aardwolf