Ask HN: How can I get better at bash?

I am interested mainly in bash helping me with the workflow of apps I run on the command line.

I used to lean on python for much of my scripting needs, mainly because the more advanced bash syntax was pretty daunting. Getting better at bash has a trickle-down effect, especially in this container age. ENV var scoping + loops and various var expansion methods really made it click for me. Shelling out to various tasks (and grabbing the results) is effortless via bash scripts. With bash on windows now it's pretty much ubiquitous. My advice is to consider why the task at hand can't be done in bash, because often times it can, with much more portability.

One thing I would say is first check that you are running the latest version! There has been a lot of development to bash over the years. If you feel like customizing things a lot I'd check out zsh and http://ohmyz.sh/. It has a lot compatible with bash with (IMO) some saner scripting support.

Aliases are something I use a lot - it's very basic but just having "big long command with options" aliases to something easy to remember makes it much more likely I will not make mistakes, can repeat it easily in loops.

Another thing that complements using bash effectively are using other applications config files. As soon as I have a new host to interact with I add it to my ssh.config file - then any scripting I need to do I don't need to deal with any special files. Other files like ~/.netrc or ~/.pgpass make my shell sessions that much more productive. For some reason many people don't bother ever updating these and rely on the shell history to do anything more than once.

CommandlineFu (http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/browse) has some nice one liners and there's often some gems on ServerFault (https://serverfault.com/questions/tagged/bash) - just browsing those for topics matching your workflow can be very fruitful.

I've found the more I do anything at the shell of any complexity I end up writing a small python command line client to do any heavy lifting. Argparse (https://docs.python.org/3/library/argparse.html) makes this trivially easy and then I can use regular shell "glue" to combine a few commands together.

Well said, it's an ongoing process and there is always something new to learn - some use case which we may not have come across. So, it's an ongoing process.

I made a search engine to show the best learning paths for learning any topics.

Here is the path for learning bash : https://learn-anything.xyz/operating-systems/unix/shells/bas...