Learn Bash the Hard Way Bash壳学习进路

Foreword

Almost every day of my 20-year software career, I’ve had to work with bash in some way or other.  Bash is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted that people know it, and under-valued as a skill because it’s easy to ‘get by’ with it.

It’s my argument that the software community is woefully under-served when it comes to learning about bash, and that mastering it pays massive dividends, and not just when using bash.

Either you are given:

  • Impenetrable man pages full of jargon that assumes you understand far more than you do

  • One-liners to solve your particular problem, leaving you no better off the next time you want to do something

  • Bash ‘guides’ that are like extended man pages - theoretical, full of jargon, and quite hard to follow

All of the above is what this book tries to address.

If you’ve ever been confused by things like:

  • The difference between [ and [[

  • The difference between globbing and regexes

  • The difference between single or double quoting in bash

  • What ` means

  • What a subshell is

  • Your terminal ‘going crazy’

then this book is for you.

It uses the ‘Hard Way’ method to ensure that you have to understand what’s needed to be understood to read those impenetrable man pages and take your understanding deeper when you need to.

Enjoy!