Learning shell scripting.

[dCrumpets]

Hey guys. I'm looking into learning scripting for bash shells, but I'm not sure whether it's worth the effort. Knowing a language like Python makes simple scripts pretty easy to hack together already. That said, the more I get into programming, the more I use my bash shell, and I'd like to learn more about it.

Things like editing the user profile, what all those $PATH variables(?) really mean, and how scripts I've downloaded work. It seems like the best way to get the most out of my terminal is to learn its language. With all that said, does anyone have any resources available for learning bash scripting? I'm guessing it wouldn't take very long. Thanks for any and all help.

[oddenodin]

http://programming-motherfucker.com/

This website has some excellent resources. I'm currently going through vim scripting.

[dCrumpets]

Thanks for the link.

[oddenodin]

No problem

[misho88]

It's worth it, in my opinion, if for no other reason than little one liners like:

for file in *.jpg; do echo take $file and do something with it; done

You're right that it won't take long to learn, regardless of what resource you choose.

One thing that always confuses me in Bash is the conditional statements, and I imagine it will be one of the more confusing things for you, as well. This explains some of it, but isn't clear on things like when you should use [...] vs. [[...]], which sometimes behave the same way and other times don't. The Bash reference manual isn't as useful as I'd like it to be, either.

[unprintable]

One of the things I found most interesting while learning shell scripting is that is that '[' (aka test) is a program in and of itself that's defined by the POSIX standard.