Bernie's Blog A confusing concoction of Java, mobile devices, technology and photography

Bashing Bash

Despite being on Linux for quite many years now, I've always come to regard bash (and bash scripting) as somewhat of an arcane magic. No idea why though, just is. To me, it's even scarier than C++ (but that's given since there were 2 semesters of C++ back in school). True enough, a few months back, there was this tiny bit of thing I needed to do in bash and I sucked at it.  Specifically, I was modifying (and fixing) someone else's script. Not fun. Got it to do what I needed it to do, but re-evaluating how certain things were done, I'll be happy if the script is forever buried.

Not any more. Thanks to a few articles over at IBM DeveloperWorks. No idea why I never came across these very useful articles before. The 3-part articles titled 'Bash By Example' (part 1, part 2, and part 3) helped tremendously in helping me understand basics of bash scripting. I'm pretty confident now that I'll be able to rely on bash to do many simple tasks that Java is overkill for.

Also some neat stuff on bash itself, see 'Bash Help'.

Makes one wonder if bash is so easy and useful, maybe the other scripting languages (ruby, python) is worth exploring seriously too. Hmm...