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The Shell Introduction I Wish I Had

Max Antonucci on July 16, 2018

Hey there past me. Hope you're doing well and keeping the horrible regrets to a minimum. I'm here to help in that regard. At least with career-rela...

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Ryan Palo • Jul 16 '18

This is awesome! I love reading different people's approaches to teaching something to a beginner. I like that you took the time to explain what a shell is and why it's useful, because I didn't get that when someone showed me a shell for the first time and I wish I would have.

A couple gotchas to add for newbies:

When you're setting variables, make sure you don't have spaces on either side of the equals sign. my_var="Soup" is right, but my_var = "Soup" will cause errors. The bash shell uses spaces to separate commands from their arguments and split strings into lists, so doing it the second way will make it think you're trying to run the my_var command with first argument "=" and second argument "Soup".
I've read a couple of things including the Bash manual that say that, in general, using aliases should be avoided in preference to using functions pretty much always. That being said, there's no Bash police, so do what works for you, especially if you're not sharing your scripts with anybody.

Anyways, great post! Thanks again :)

Max Antonucci • Jul 17 '18

Thanks for the feedback! Good point about the variable names, this article is a pretty broad overview so its no surprise I missed a few details like that. But they, I can always write a few follow-up pieces too.

I agree about it being good to explain why the Shell matters. I think that's actually the most important detail for me, since in the start when I researched it, there's no shortage of guides about how to use it. But until I really understood the why with the Pragmatic Programmer, I never saw why it mattered so much to stick through the learning process and bring that all back to my career. That's likely the part of the article I'd have wanted the most for my past self haha.

Ryan Palo • Jul 17 '18

Yep, and I think you definitely did a great job at that!

Jon Forrest • Jul 20 '18

"Vim is, at its core, a text-editor. It's built into the Shell"

This isn't true (that Vim is built into the Shell). Vim might be in a directory contained in your PATH variable, but it's not built into the shell. (Note that I don't capitalize "shell", and I don't know why you do, but that's quibbling.)

Eljay-Adobe • Jul 17 '18

I'm a Unix nerd, through-and-through. I love the Mac. It's a great Unix system. I've heard it has a GUI too, but I stick with Terminal and bash. GUI is probably just a fad.

Chad Windham • Jul 17 '18

GUI is just a fad. I laughed so hard when I read that! good job

p-mcgowan • Jul 17 '18

My fav -

cdl() { cd "$@" && ls ; }

It took me a very long time before I started using that, but 90% of the time I'm going to ls after a cd. And because I'm silly, I end up ls'ing twice pretty often...

Max Antonucci • Jul 17 '18

That's true, I often do the same. May add this to my alias list myself.

Vlastimil Pospichal • Jul 17 '18

alias bashrc='vim "$HOME/.bashrc" && . "$HOME/.bashrc"'
alias ll='ls -l'
alias mv='mv -i'
alias header='curl -s -D-'
alias myIP='ip route get 8.8.8.8 | awk '\''{print $NF, "GW", $3; exit}'\'''

Tom • Jul 28 '18

About vim, you can add

export EDITOR='nano'

to .bash_profile to switch default editor to Nano.
Nano maybe is less powerful but much more intuitive for new bash users (to be honest I still use it and don't want invest my time into vim). And another thing that it is almost on all linux distributions as I know so you don't have to switch from nano editor on your local machine to vim on remote instances

David James • Jul 17 '18

Coders need the Shell to do their job best. It's not going anywhere. No matter how uncomfortable you are in the start, take a deep breath and start using it

Super great article, as someone who loved using GUI's I was pretty against learning terminal at first until I saw how powerful and necessary it was to becoming a Web Developer.

Max Antonucci • Jul 17 '18

I felt the same for the start of my career too. For git source control I kept using SourceTree due to its GUI until I saw I was missing out on so much of its functionality that way.

Ashley Sheridan • Jul 27 '18

Worth mentioning that Bash is the default shell of most Linux distributions. Given Linux is the most popular operating system in the world, and that Bash is available on Mac and Windows too, it's definitely worth learning.

Ikem Krueger • Aug 11 '18 • Edited

With Bash, you can run cd ~ to get to your root directory

It is getting you to your „home“ directory.

A single „cd“ hit by the enter key, does the same as „cd ~“.

Dave • May 18 '20 • Edited

Vim is, at its core, a text-editor. It's built into the Shell

Nope, it's really not. Whatever shell you're using, vim is an application in its own right. Same as the shell is an application.

Most of the time, when I'm installing a new OS, vim isn't even installed by default (but various shell's are).

Eljay-Adobe • Jul 18 '18

As a desktop OS, I've tried Yellow Dog Linux, DEC Alpha Tru64 UNIX, and Solaris. (By "desktop" I assume you mean it uses KDE or Gnome or somesuch, and is GUI based with a mouse.)

As a terminal-style OS, I've used Microsoft Xenix. (That was before Xenix was spun off into SCO... and we all know how that story ends.)

I've not used OpenBSD nor FreeBSD. But since I'm a Theo de Raadt fanboy, well OpenBSD is more my bag. On a lark, I have used Darwin for about a week, which owes some lineage to FreeBSD.

All that being said, I also have a warm spot in my heart for Amiga. I am sometimes tempted to get the latest Amiga -- currently A-EON's AmigaOne X5000. But then I open my wallet and see the tumbleweeds blow out of it.

qm64 • Jul 25 '18

Follow on, my fav unmentioned commands are:

find
xargs
less
tee
cut
paste

Karl Haines • Aug 4 '22

Very simple and to the point, funny that I've been using a linux shell for 27 years now but I actually took the time to read your article just to see how you did! I guess you drew in my interest somehow, lol. The shadow knows. Anyway, you did great and clearly are talented with such things! Keep up the good work and before too long opensource will finally take over the world!

Karl (linuxkarl615)

Fanny • Jul 29 '18

Great!

Ben Halpern • Jul 16 '18

Brilliant post Max!

Max Antonucci • Jul 17 '18

Aww shucks :)

Victor Shi • Jul 23 '18

I've used the shell quite a bit out of necessity, but this high-level overview has done wonders for bringing my existing knowledge together as well as making me want to learn more!