Saturday, August 23, 2014

Better Bash Scripting

I start every bash script with the following prolog:
#!/bin/bash
set -o nounset
set -o errexit
This will take care of two very common errors:

Referencing undefined variables (which default to “”)

Ignoring failing commands

[…]

Bash has a number of (underappreciated) ways to manipulate strings.

[…]

Some commands expect filenames as parameters so straightforward pipelining does not work. This is where <() operator comes in handy as it takes a command and transforms it into something which can be used as a filename.

Bash Programming