A collection of various bash tips and tricks collected from various sources.

the-bash-guide.md

The Bash Guide

A collection of various bash tips and tricks collected from various sources. I'm writing this as I learn new stuff, so this is in no way authoritative or even corrent. In fact, you shouldn't read this.

Basics

Version, updates and installation

Check your version:

echo $BASH_VERSION

If you're on Mac OS X, and you're using using homebrew then:

brew install bash
brew update
brew upgrade bash

The path

bash stores something called a PATH variable, telling it where to look for programs and scripts. You can see what your path is by typing:

echo $PATH

You'll get a long list that looks something like this:

/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/go/bin

That's each path, for example /usr/sbin, separated by a colon (:)

Pipes

The $ sign

.bashrc and .bash_profile

Command History

Search previous commands using arrow keys.

Add this to your ~/.bash_rc file

# supports history search using up and down arrows
bind '"\e[A": history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B": history-search-forward'
bind '"\eOA": history-search-backward'
bind '"\eOB": history-search-forward'
set show-all-if-ambiguous on
set completion-ignore-case on

A handy shorcut to run the previous command with sudo

Add this to your .bashrc file:

# run previous command with sudo 
alias fuck='sudo $(history -p \!\!)'

Programming

Bash programming is horribly hard, and it's easy to make mistakes. But don't let that put you off -- it's a lovely feeling to write a code snippet that you can directly run in your terminal.

Variables

For loops

Matrices, Arrays and Vectors

Misc. Useful programs

Compress all subfolders in a folder to their own zip file

 for i in *
> do
> [ -d "$i" ] && zip -r "$i.zip" "$i"
> done

Sources

1. Bash Productivity Tips
2. The Terminal
3. Defensive Bash Programming
4. Bash Strict Mode
5. Updating bash
6. Upadting PS1