(Post theme: Hall of Fame (feat. will.i.am) by The Script)

As mentioned previously, I purchased the set of Wizard Zines via my annual training budget, and am working through them. Current reading: Bite Size Bash.

The first 20 pages surprised me – I don’t consider myself particularly knowledgeable in terms of bash (or similar shell scripting) but pretty much everything in the basics I’ve managed to somehow pick up over the last couple of decades, despite usually jumping pretty quickly into another tool whenever my needs get above simple. It is a great intro, though, and I would have benefited having this at hand years back.

On page 20, parameter expansion is introduced. Most of this was either new to me, or I think I’ve seen but certainly wouldn’t remember to use. I’m not sure how to make this stick, though – the syntax is so odd. Maybe I should just jump to this page next time I’m writing bash, or maybe I’ll remember that it can be done and that will be enough to look it up or remember. I do wonder if LLM will replace this sort of learned syntax, though.

After that, it was background processes and subshells, both of which were again surprisingly familiar. After that is trapping signals – I knew this could be done, but I’m pretty sure by the time I have something that needs to do this, I’ve already moved to another language, and I don’t see that changing. Errors and debugging were also mostly things I knew, except for ‘trap x DEBUG’, which seems pretty handy.

Overall, this zine surprised me: I expected to learn a lot, and instead recognised a lot. In some ways, this is great: I feel more confident that I do actually know the most useful core of shell scripting (even though certainly not the vast area beyond that). I’d definitely recommend it for shell scripting beginners (especially bash) but likely not for others.