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Nov 8, 2023
The bash book to rule them all

I to /bin/bash and last week I came around the one bash book to rule them all.

Efficient Linux at the Command Line by Daniel J. Barrett.
Why it is good

"I learned a lot" does not help since you don't know where I started from anyway. So here is a curated list of questions you can ask yourself to decide if this book is for you.

You want to understand why cd is not an executable but a builtin?

You want a pretty book with a beautiful Saker falcon illustration on the cover?

You want to know why this redirect does not work?

$ sudo echo "New log file" > /var/log/custom.log
bash: /var/log/custom.log: Permission denied

You want to demystify the fallacy of "global variables" and understand what export means?

You want to understand how job control works, and how it is all a shell construct?

You want to know what this error message means and how to avoid it?

$ rm *.txt
-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long

You want to learn tricks that will spare your fingers like using |& instead of 2>&1 |?

You want to be reminded of the treasure of tools available such as wc, cat, head, cut, grep, sort, uniq, ssh, date, seq, yes, xargs, find, awk,tac, paste, diff, tr, rev, curl, wget, man, rsync, tee, less, and more?

You want to finally understand the differences between .bashrc and .bash_profile?

You want to learn eleven (11!) ways to run a command?

You want to know the difference between using " and '?

You want to understand the differences between a child shell and a sub-shell?

Happy Reading!


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