So I’ve seen a few shells in my time…everything from the venerable 4DOS and csh, to the modern zsh and fish (my personal favorite).

Even so, I’m not ashamed to say that I love bash. Or rather, I love making bash work for me. Bash itself is pretty old, and not all that loveable. I don’t really care. It’s everywhere, and it’s good enough. I work on a lot of systems, many of them production. My job isn’t to turn them into my own personal playground…I get paid to work on systems with others, and that means taking the system as it comes.

In short, if you work with linux systems, you aren’t doing yourself any favors by not knowing bash inside and out. And once you do, you’ll find that you don’t need to reach for many other tools a lot of the time.

But I’m not blogging to explain everything there is to know about bash. I’ve written a pretty decent series on approaching bash already (see the blog index). I’m going to try to write some short entries on how I use bash. Follow me if you will…

See part 2, I Was Scared Of Bash.