The Bash Shell reads command line until it reaches a carriage-return. This permits the user to create very long command strings if necessary.

Bash is the default command line interface for many Linux distributions and a powerful scripting language. Here are some suggestions that will keep your Bash scripts efficient and lean. Feel free to comment with your own suggestions.

The Bash Debugger Project (bashdb) lets you set breakpoints, inspect variables, perform a backtrace, and step through a bash script line by line. In other words, it provides the features you expect in a C/C++ debugger to anyone programming a bash script.

Scripts are files that contain shell commands which may be short or can be very complex. Scripts just make it easier because you can invoke one command to run all of the commands in the script. Here instead of using 8 separate commands you can use one command to execute all of them.

I've always wanted to know how to create command line options for my Bash scripts. After some research I found there are two functions available to handle this; getopt and getopts. I'm not going to get into the debate about which one is better. getopts is a shell builtin and seems a little easier to implement than getopt, so I'll go with that for now.

How to use a Bash Shell script to record the activity of users. This
script is useful in rebuilding the actions of users as they work at
the command line.

What if we could use a bash script to use "apt-get" with Axel (a command line application which accelerates HTTP/FTP downloads by using multiple sources for one file) so the "apt-get" download speed would increase dramatically? Well, you can, thanks to Matt Parnell who has created a bash script which does just that.

Reading files is no big deal with bash: you just redirect the input to the script or pipe the output of another command into the script, or you could do it inside the script if the file names are pre-determined. You could also use process substitution to pass in the open files (command pipelines actually) from the command line.

Over the course of writing The Linux Command Line and this blog, I've had frequent need of good reference resources for command line programs including the shell itself. Here is my list of the ones that stand out: