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? But no more! It’s finally time to look behind the curtain and decipher and understand what’s actually happening.
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.
The first version of my Calibre export tool got released today!
Shell scripting is a powerful tool available on all platforms, even Windows, thanks to WSL. But it can be easy to make mistakes. Here are some tips to improve our scripts and avoid many problems.
No matter what your daily driver is, most of us also have to write some shell scripts to automate stuff. Usually, we would use bash script, Python, Perl, or some other scripting language. But what if we could use a compiled language instead?