Quoting things in bash is quite simple... until it isn't. I've written scripts where I'd swear 90% of the effort was getting bash to quote things correctly.

Everybody's seen redirection in bash commands, that's pretty common, but bash also allows you to define redirections when you define functions. This causes the redirections to be evaluated/executed whenever the function is called. This feature doesn't really give you any new features, just another way to express existing features.

This article is a continuation to my other Bash-related post, 6 Bash Productivity Tips. Since that article gathered many useful comments and I bumped into several more over the net, here are 5 more tips and tricks. Although these may not be necessarily productivity-related, they will surely ease working in a Bash terminal and it may be worth knowing them.

Previously I've shown how to use the bash while loop in a bash script. Today I'm going to show how to use another type of do loop in bash: the for loop.

One of the most powerful aspects of popular high-level languages is the existence of a comprehensive standard library. Unfortunately, the most popular Linux shell, bash, lacks a full-featured library bundled with it. A number of people have written libraries to compensate for this lack, which can make your life infinitely easier if you need to write complex bash scripts.

Pressing the tab key in bash to auto-complete a file name is one of the most time saving tricks especially when dealing with very long file names. Unfortunately, file name completion is not always the right behavior. This is where the bash-completion package steps in.

The devil they say is in details, even the simple Bash path variable can open some security problems on your box. Every Bash documentation out there warns us not leave '.' in the path (it matches current directory). They however don't seems to mention that leaving a dangling ':' (colon) at the beginning or the end of Bash $PATH does create the same security vulnerability.

By and large, most Red Hat Linux systems will have Bash as the default shell. Bash is a darn great shell, but this article is about another equally great shell, called Z-Shell, that has most of the attributes of Bash, but in some cases goes the extra mile to give you the flexibility to customize your shell more than Bash allows.

Now that we have covered some of the minor improvements found in bash 4.x, we will begin looking at the more significant new features focusing on changes in the way bash 4.x handles expansions.