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?

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.