Navigating the shell is an indispensable skill. While GUIs might be more intuitive in some ways than the command line, they lack the speed and raw power a shell offers. Therefore, efficient shell navigation that goes beyond just cd goes a long way.

Shell scripting is vital for automating repetitive tasks and simplifying complex commands into a more straightforward format. Understanding the details of shell scripting enables us to write more robust, portable, and efficient scripts.

Shell traps catch POSIX signals (and more) to allow asynchronous inter-process communication to inform any process or particular thread of various events and do some work. But do you know about all the different signals and ways to use the trap command?

Recently, I stumbled upon an OCR tool for Linux. However, I didn’t like the idea of needing a GUI app, so I wrote a shell script connecting the right CLI tools instead. This article dissects “grab-text”, a simple POSIX-compatible shell script I wrote for grabbing text from your screen.

Shell redirection can be confusing. I’ve always wondered what 2>&1 means and why it’s needed, but as many others, I just copy/pasted things from the internet into my terminal and hoped for the best. What could possibly go wrong?

Around 6 years ago, I wrote about using Java for shell scripts. It was a hacky and fragile way to convert some Java code into a shebanged file containing the content of a Jar file. However, Java evolved quite a bit since that article, so it’s time to look at it again.