I've set up my .bash_profile to colour code the hostname in the command prompt differently depending on which machine I'm on. I have a separate file for specifying the host colours, which is sourced ...

The bash man page has long had the following bug listed: "It's too big and too slow" (at the very bottom of the man page). If you agree with that, then you probably won't want to read about the "new" ...

I have a text file contining a list of strings, one string per line. The number of lines in this file is unknown, but not large (less than 50). Space characters in these strings are quoted with '\' (i ...

Auto-completion is a great way to make your own tools more accessible. Find out how to take the first steps by building a simple Bash and zsh auto-complete script. Autocomplete—found everywhere from ...

If you're used to a "standard" *NIX shell you may not be familiar with bash's array feature. Although not as powerful as similar constructs in the P languages (Perl, Python, and PHP) and others, they ...

In Bash, a hash is a data structure that can contain many sub-variables, of the same or different kinds, but indexes them with user-defined text strings, or keys, instead of fixed numeric identifiers.