Mark Wilkinson has started a new series on Bash. His first post is an introduction to the scripting language:
Bash (the Bourne Again Shell) was created in 1989 for the GNU Project as a free replacement for the Unix Bourne shell. Most modern Linux systems use Bash as their default command line shell, so if you have ever dropped to a command line on a Linux system, you have probably used Bash. Just like PowerShell, Bash is both a scripting language and a command shell/interpreter. So not only can you execute commands in an interactive shell session, but you can also write scripts that incorporate multiple commands.
Once you get your hands dirty with Bash you’ll notice a lot of features that were incorporated into PowerShell. Things like command substitution:
$(Get-Date)were directly pulled from Bash$(date). Other features will look familiar as well, like the ability to pipe multiple commands together.One thing you need to understand right away is that Bash is string based, not object based like PowerShell. This means you’ll find yourself doing a lot more string processing to get tasks done. Things like string splitting will be much more common. Bash does support objects, like arrays, but few if any commands output an array. As we go through this series you’ll see that this might not be as limiting as it sounds.
The best part about learning Bash is that you can then get into arguments about Bash vs ksh vs zsh.