Articles on Shell

Top deep-dives on Shell

Effective Shell

I wanted to get a third article related to running something where it wasn't mean to run, but nothing promising came up in my searches. This book-esque article by Dave Kerr has everything shell related, from a typical introduction, to more complicated concepts like scripting and managing your toolkit.

An Opinionated Guide to xargs

Knowing your way around the shell can be a powerful skill. Plus personally it makes me feel like a l33t h4k3r whenever I can automate a task using bash or show off infront of non-programmer friends. Well as the title implies, this article is all about using xargs in the shell. Starting with a brief but informative explanation of what xargs is, the author then gives a variety of use cases, including examples and justifications as to why xargs is the choice for the specific situation.

A Guide to the Terminal, Console, and Shell

Matthieu Cneude discusses the history of the terminal, the shell, and the console and how they are used in Linux-based systems.
Some highlights:

• From telegraphs to terminal emulators
• The virtual console itself runs in the kernel, and your shell as well as its child processes run in user land
• "knowing how the terminal and most common shells work gives you an edge, especially when your terminal don’t behave as you want it to"

COLODEBUG: a simple way to improve bash script debugging

The code flow in a shell script can be difficult to follow. In this introductory article, Johannes Truschnigg presents a couple of lines of code that you can add to your shell scripts to get comments printing as it runs.

ngrok for the wicked, or expose your ports comfortably

Alexander Solovyov demonstrates how to create a free ngrok substitute for when you want to use custom domains.

Remembering Buildtool

Julio Merino dives back into a build tool he wrote in 10,000 lines of shell code in 2004.