Bash is a very powerful Unix shell and command scripting language.The man page for Bash is a well written and informational document. Additional guides, information, and examples can be found at the Linux Documentation Project. Shellcheck.net provides a web interface (and binary for some distros) that checks shell scripts for errors or common issues and provides information on how to best correct them.

In the course you will revisit some basic concepts of a Unix-like operating system and review the set of Unix core-utils one needs for everyday scripting. Also you will learn the bash shell and its core language features, including

• control statements (if,for,while, . . . )

• file or user input/output

• bash functions

• features simplifying code reuse and script structure

The final exercises will be concerned with the extraction of information (e.g. from files)using so-called regular expressions and programs like awk, sed or grep.

As there isn't much of a bash ecosystem, there also isn't really a defacto leader in the bash testing area. For these examples we are using bats. You should be able to install it from sources like this:

$ git clone https://github.com/sstephenson/bats.git
$ cd bats
$ ./install.sh $HOME/root

• Shellcheck provides shell script guidelines and help

• The Linux Documentation Project Guides

• Bash man page

• Also thanks for material for the advanced bash scripting course at Heidelberg University