Gain insights into the intricacies of the Bash shell, ideal for beginners. Delve into essential skills with interactive learning designed to ensure lasting knowledge without requiring prior experience.

dockerbash.tar.gz

tset

A course for anyone interested in understanding all aspects of the bash shell. Designed for use by beginners, it assumes as little knowledge as possible but teaches you all the intricacies of bash it took me decades to learn by trial and error. 

The interactive nature of the course instills the knowledge in a way you will not forget!

Master the Bash Shell


# How Important is this Lesson?

In this lesson you will build on what you learned previously about:

- Bash arrays

- Terminal escape codes

- Built-ins

- Bash functions

- Bash startup scripts

to comprehend more deeply a feature you will probably use almost every time
you use bash.

# Autocompleting Commands

If you hit the `TAB` key on your keyboard twice at the default prompt, then
you should see something like this:

```html
Display all 2266 possibilities (y or n)?
```


If you're brave enough to hit `y` then you will see a list of all the commands
available in your path.

To escape that list, hit `q`.

Now if you try typing `z` on a fresh shell command line, and then hit `TAB`
twice, you will likely immediately see the commands available that begin with
`z`.

That's autocomplete in bash - by default, you get the commands available that
match the letters you've typed in so far. This is handy if you can only remember
part of a command, or you just want to see what commands start with `a` (try
it!).

# Autocompleting Arguments 

In addition to looking for commands, bash's autocomplete can be made to be
context-aware. A simple example of this is to see what happens when you type
`ls`, and then a space, and then `TAB` twice on a fresh shell line. What
happens? You should see that this time commands are not listed, but something
else...

Listing local files is something of a default in bash - it assumes that arguments
are likely to be files. What I'm going to show you next is how you can get
bash to be even more context dependent with auto-complete to the point where you
can advise the user of your specific program about what is available to them.

# A Simple Program

First you're going to create a program called `myecho`. As you type it in, try
and work out what it's doing.

If you don't understand a line or command in there, then try and find out what
it does by playing with it in a toy script, or try and find out from `man bash`.




In this lesson, you will cover how autocomplete works in bash, the bash 'shift' builtin, and changing case in variables.

Core Bash

Scripting Bash

Bash in Practice

Advanced Bash

Autocomplete

How Important is this Lesson?

Autocompleting Commands