Bash/General Use
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General Use
To get the best use of Bash, you should read the man page. It's extensive, and gives you an idea of what you can do with it; although it lacks examples, which sometimes leave you guessing.
Bash Error Handling
In almost all cases (with some notable exceptions) I recommend the use of the -e flag when running bash scripts. You can do this in a number of ways. At the start of a script:
#!/bin/bash -e
In the script:
set -e
When running manually:
bash -e ./myscript
This means that the script will terminate as soon as it sees an error. This can be particularly important, not just as a general programming principle, but it means for example if you misparse a filename due to a syntax error, you don't end up passing '/' to rm -rf as root.
Debugging
Use the -x flag for debugging of a script; this traces its execution. You might want to use this:
bash -ex ./myscript 2>&1 | less
See Also
- http://www.gnu.org/software/bash/ - GNU BASH homepage.
