Bash

16 Mentors

Our mentors are friendly, experienced Bash developers who will help teach you new techniques and tricks.

14,843 Students

Join thousands of students who have enjoyed learning and improving their skills by taking this track.

87 Exercises

Hundreds of hours have gone into making these exercises fun, useful, and challenging to help you enjoy learning.

About Bash

#!/bin/bash

echo "Hello, World!"

Bash is the language that you will learn to love!

Many of your everyday computer tasks can be done using the concise scripts it can produce. You will soon learn that while most things can be done through a Graphical User Interface, it can actually be vastly faster to use this powerful language! The command interpreter typically runs in a text window, where users may input commands (operations may also come from some files, also known as Bash scripts).

More formally, Bash (an acronym for Bourne-again shell, a pun around the Bourne shell and the term "born-again") is a Unix command interpreter. Offering a number of improvements over several other shells (Bash has some useful functionality in regards to command history, job control and command line editing).

A really good way to think about Bash is the following:

Although most users think of the shell as an interactive command interpreter, it is really a programming language in which each statement runs a command. Because it must satisfy both the interactive and programming aspects of command execution, it is a strange language, shaped as much by history as by design. —- Brian Kernighan & Rob Pike

cite: Kernighan, Brian W.; Pike, Rob (1984). The UNIX Programming Environment. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall. ISBN 0-13-937699-2.

Though it was first released several decades ago after being written by Brian Fox of the Free Software Foundation, Bash is still used across the world every day! From automation to stitching a project together, the language is still as versatile as it ever was. Another benefit of the language's age is the rich documentation you'll find surrounding it. If you're ever stuck and don't know exactly how to implement an exercise, a great place to start is the built-in help, available through the use of info bash or man bash.

This track is to help you gain some experience in this wonderful scripting language.

Happy Bash'ing

Join the Bash track

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The reviews are incredibly helpful because they help me see things that I missed, learn about new ways and sometimes interesting discussions that can add a fun twist to maybe a simple problem.

Bud Chirica, Scotland

Relaxed. Encouraging. Supportive.

Meet the Bash Track mentors

Once you join the Bash language track, you will receive support and feedback from our team of mentors. Here are the bios of a few of the mentors of this track.

Glenn Jackman https://github.com/glennj

Bash is one of the first languages encountered by a *nix newcomer. It has a unique position in the programming ecosystem as both the interactive shell and as a fully-fledged programming language. One can do amazing things with it, as long as one accepts the need to be somewhat disciplined in order to handle the sometimes gnarly syntax. I've been a command line *nix hacker for over 25 years and I am happy to assist others on their quest for shell mastery.

Fun. Challenging. Interesting

Community-sourced Bash exercises

These are a few of the 87 exercises on the Bash track. You can see all the exercises here.

Passionate. Knowledgeable. Creative.

Meet the Bash Track maintainers

The Bash Maintainers are the brains behind the Bash Track. They spend their spare time creating interesting and challenging exercises that we can all learn from. We are incredibly grateful for their hard work. Here are the bios of a few of the maintainers of this track.