At this point in our shell script writing journey, I certainly hope you can read that rather cryptic conditional statement and understand what it does. Ultimately, it's a bit of work to parse ...

The most arcane shell commands and options are explained with plenty of examples. “Here” documents, a way to feed input to a script or command within the script itself, are explained thoroughly.

It is easy to dismiss bash — the typical Linux shell program — as just a command prompt that allows scripting. Bash, however, is a full-blown programming language. I wouldn’t pres… ...