Tag: bash

Shell Setup in 2026: Starship, Plugins, Fish

Oh My Zsh had its moment. Here's the 2026 shell setup: Starship prompt, three killer plugins, and when to consider Fish or Nushell.

Git Hooks You Should Be Using Locally Right Now

Stop committing broken code. Git hooks catch mistakes before they hit CI, save hours of debugging, and make your team love you.

Bulk File Renaming on Linux: rename, vidir, fd

Master bulk file renaming on Linux with rename, vidir, fd, and mmv. The right tool for every scenario from regex rewrites to visual editing.

Disk Space Tools in 2026: Beyond du and df

du and df still work, but Rust-era tools like dust, duf, and fclones make disk triage faster and way less painful in 2026.

Compression in 2026: zstd Changed the Game

zstd is as fast as gzip with near-xz compression ratios. Here's why you should drop bzip2 forever and how to use zstd in 2026.

Named Pipes (FIFOs) in Shell Scripts

Named pipes (FIFOs) let you buffer and synchronize between processes. They're underused but solve real problems: queuing, coordination, and complex data flows.

Bash Arrays: The Feature That Makes Scripts Readable

Declare, iterate, and manipulate arrays safely. Use indexed and associative arrays for clean bash code.

Bash Process Substitution: What <() and >() Actually Do

Process substitution lets you treat a command's output as a file, and feed input to a command as if it were a file. It's weird but powerful.

Here Documents vs Here Strings in Bash

<<EOF syntax for multiline input, <<-EOF for indentation, <<<string for single lines. When to use each.

GNU parallel for Embarrassingly Parallel Tasks

GNU parallel runs tasks in parallel across CPU cores. It's faster than xargs and easier than writing a job queue. Here's when and how to use it.

trap in Bash: Clean Up When Your Script Dies

trap EXIT for cleanup, trap INT/TERM for graceful shutdown, trap ERR for errors. Reliable error handling.

Debugging Bash Scripts: set -x and Beyond

set -x prints every command before it runs. Add PS4 for context. Use trap for cleanup. Here's the toolkit every bash debugger needs.