BashGuide

A new version of this guide is currently being drafted. For now, this guide is still the most complete and best reviewed. Any contributions to the new guide are welcome via GitHub forks.

This guide aims to aid people interested in learning to work with BASH. It aspires to teach good practice techniques for using BASH, and writing simple scripts.

This guide is targeted at beginning users. It assumes no advanced knowledge -- just the ability to login to a Unix-like system and open a command-line (terminal) interface. It will help if you know how to use a text editor; we will not be covering editors, nor do we endorse any particular editor choice. Familiarity with the fundamental Unix tool set, or with other programming languages or programming concepts, is not required, but those who have such knowledge may understand some of the examples more quickly.

If something is unclear to you, you are invited to report this (use BashGuideFeedback, or the #bash channel on irc.libera.chat) so that it may be clarified in this document for future readers.

You are invited to contribute to the development of this document by extending it or correcting invalid or incomplete information.

The primary maintainer(s) of this document:

• -- Lhunath (primary author)

• -- GreyCat

The guide is also available in PDF format. Alternatively, you can just hit print after going to FullBashGuide. That guarantees you'll be printing the latest version of this document.

The guide has been divided into sections, which are intended to be read roughly in the order presented. If you skip ahead to a specific section, you might find yourself missing some background information from previous sections. (Links to relevant sections are not always provided when a topic is mentioned.)

• Commands and Arguments

  • Types of commands; argument splitting; writing scripts.

• Special Characters

• Parameters

  • Variables; special parameters; parameter types; parameter expansion.

• Patterns

  • Globs; filename matching; extended globs; brace expansion; regular expressions.

• Tests and Conditionals

  • Exit status; && and ||; if, test and [[; while, until and for; case and select.

• Arrays

  • Arrays; associative arrays.

• Input and Output

  • Redirection; here documents; here strings; pipes; process substitution.

• Compound Commands

  • Subshells; command grouping; arithmetic evaluation; functions; aliases.

• Sourcing

  • Reading commands from other files.

• Job Control

• Practices

  • Choosing your shell; quoting; readability; debugging.