Intro to BASH

When we here about BASH, we always think what it is and where do we use that exactly? Maybe some of us have heard about this while working at Unix based Operating Systems or when reading about them.

However, there is still some lack of conviction to fully understand the use case of BASH and what that is exactly.

 

BASH is a scripting language which is a command line interpreter that we can see on any UNIX based systems terminals which interprets the commands line-by-line. BASH stands for Bourne again Shell.

Bash was first released in 1989 and Brian Fox was the guy who started writing code in Bash. Bash takes commands from a user and read / execute them from a file known as Shell script which ends with .sh extension. Bash supports various functionalities like globbing (used to give wildcard entries to match certain extensions / file names), piping (using a cmd with another one), variables, condition testing, functions and iteration.

 

Why do we use BASH?

We use BASH to automate repetitive tasks and run scripts which can achieve certain auditing and debugging purpose while looking at a massive log file.

 

There are many other reasons out there to use BASH:

1.       System administration (Configuring permissions, installing programs, running updates, manipulating multiple files / directories, and running tests).

2.       Consumes lesser resource than GUI (Less resource intensive)

3.       Used in cloud as well (which helps a lot to do things quicker)

How to learn BASH?

There are ton of resources on YouTube and tutorials on several websites which can help one to learn BASH.

Any certs which can assist us in learning BASH along with basics of Linux?

Yes – please take a look at LPI Essentials exam.

https://www.lpi.org/our-certifications/linux-essentials-overview