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Introducing mckern.sh

Towney loudmouth starts a shell scripting blog

Why would someone possibly do this, when The Bash Hackers Wiki, Greg’s Wiki, and countless other “best practices” blog posts already exist?

mild narcissism

In terms of narcissism, I can begin to approach anything useful that Stack Overflow brings to the table.

OK… But why?

I started pitching some talks during 2018, centered around the idea of “Bash 101” – a series of introductory level “how to’s” for Bash, tailored to folks who have little-to-no experience with shell scripting (or shells in general). What led me to this subject specifically was:

  • I’ve worked with a lot more career-changers, code academy graduates, and folks from “unconventional” tech industry backgrounds in the last couple of years (and they’re awesome!), but using a shell (any shell) was consistently just the means to an end during their training or studying. Anything new and relatively unexplained can be scary for anyone, and I want to help folks build experience and confidence any way I can.
  • Bash is probably the most common default shell on UNIX-ish platforms (but times are changing). That doesn’t mean I won’t digress into other shells or talk about really useful command-line tools but I plan to focus on solid Bash scripting fundamentals first and foremost.
  • Blogging will allow me to supplement talks that I’ve given with more detail than I can fit into a 5 to 45 minute talk slot. Here’s one of those talks, where I timed the whole thing very, very poorly! But with a corresponding blog post, I can finally expand on what I ran out of time for during that talk.

Greetings

With that, I leave you with the first real post: Bash By The Numbers. I’m excited to work on this, and I hope someone, somewhere finds the work useful.