WTFisBASH?

This repository is a place for me to store reference materials, examples, guides, etc. The purpose of this repository is to maintain an easily referenced and concise aggregation of bash related knowledge that I would otherwise certainly forget.

Useless Uses

A common joke in the Unix comminity is the "Useless Use of Cat" which most people (myself included) are frequently guilty. Aside from cat there are a few other utilities that are often misused.

• Useless uses of

Functions

Here you can find a list of some of the functions I find useful.

• Functions

U&L Common Duplicates

This is a list of canonical questions from the Unix & Linux Stack Exchange that are commonly asked over and over. Because they are so common it is a good place to look for solutions to issues you may experience.

• U&L Duplicates

Style Guide

I wrote a style guide, mostly based on Google's style guide however I don't agree with many of the practices that they recommend/introduce. Since code style is strongly opinionated and usually a catalyst for conflict I recommend you skip this and don't read my guide. If you must it can be found below:

• Bash Style Guide

Recommended Resources

This is just a list of my favorite places to obtain information about bash scripting

• Bash Reference Manual
  • This is the authoritative reference for anything bash related. They made it after all. It is also extremely easy to ready from start to finish.
• Bash Pitfalls
  • You should read this entire page twice before writing any script that will be run in production.
• Shell & Utilities
  • This resource is written specifically for sh however it includes many useful lessons still relevant to bash and other utilities one would use in a bash script.
• The GNU Awk User's Guide
  • While awk is a separate programming language altogether, being proficient with it's use will certainly improve the functionality and performance of your bash scripts.
• U&L Stack Exchange
  • This site has become the default catch-all for bash related questions. While they can also be posted on stack overflow, I believe that U&L is a much better resource for bash/shell scripting.
• The Unix Shell
  • This is an article written by Stephen Bourne about the Bourne Shell but has some good information relevant to Bash and is a cool piece of history in general.

Miscellaneous Reading

This section will contain a list of links to various articles/sites that I think are worth reading but could not find another spot to put them in.

• Why does my shell script choke on whitespace or other special characters?
• bashrc PS1 generator
• Handling Positional Parameters
• bash_profile vs bashrc