Bash can be elegant too — Almost every developer, as long as he or she handled something relative to Linux, knows some bash commands. But it’s not necessarily everyone knows how to write and use functions properly and elegantly in bash. In fact, if you just want to give a long command a shorter name for…

Bash scripting is more interesting than you expected — Loops are indispensable parts of programs and almost all programming languages provide support for writing different types of loops. Bash also provides ways for writing loops. Some ways are similar to other languages, such as C and Python, but a few ways are very special even weird. This article will…

Handling strings like a guru — String manipulation is one of the essential jobs for any programming language, Bash included. However, it’s a long journey to master string manipulation in Bash. It’s not only about the syntax, cause you also need to know a few command-line tools for handling strings, such as awk, grep and sed…

And how to answer them properly — A web developer should have a comprehensive understanding of browsers, and one of the most essential concepts are cookies. Questions about cookies are commonly asked in tech interviews, from startups to tech giants. This article will explain 5 questions about cookies that you must be able to answer them precisely…

Avoid unexpected issues in advance — For some server-side operations, writing a bash script is probably the most convenient way to do what you want. But the problem is, some developers may think a small script is not as serious as a large codebase. I saw a software team of a startup even doesn’t do any…

Transferring files securely and conveniently — Once upon a time, I saw my intern using a GUI tool to upload local files to a remote server through FTP. That’s good. But as far as I was concerned, it’s not a professional way to do it. So I introduced the SCP command to her. She came back…

Do more by less — If you handled cloud servers before, you probably have the same feeling: It’s easy to use the ssh command to connect to a remote server. But it’s painful to always input the location of the key file on your terminal. For example, if you connect to an AWS EC2 server…

It redirects stdin into arguments of a command — In the world of Linux, there is a commonly used tool called xargs. Simply put, it can redirect standard input (stdin) into another command’s arguments. This is super useful when you handle pipelines but some commands can’t receive stdin. For example, the following command can’t print anything: date | echo …

A small feature can make your life much easier — Bash has a special mechanism called expansion, which gives us much convenience. So we can use some notations to write a short command that will be expanded into something complex before being executed. For example, with the help of brace expansion, it’s easy to generate 12 files each for one…