Hands-On: Learn Bash

Bash is the universal glue of software engineering, yet many developers rely on copy-pasting snippets without understanding how the shell actually processes commands, which is a fast way to introduce silent failures into your CI/CD pipelines. This course builds a rigorous mental model of Bash, starting from prompt fundamentals like navigating directories, building relative paths, and manipulating files. You will quickly move into text processing, learning how to write files with redirection, match text with grep, and connect commands through pipelines. From there, the course covers expansions and shell data, teaching you exactly how quotes expand, how to capture command output, and how to work with fallback values and indexed arrays. Once the interactive fundamentals are solid, you will transition to writing executable scripts, handling positional parameters, preserving arguments, and properly returning an exit status to build a parameterized backup tool.

With the basics in place, you will learn to add robust control flow using file tests, string and integer comparisons, and fixed-set matching with case. You will automate repetitive work by looping over matching files, counting with arithmetic loops, and safely reading files line by line to generate batch status reports. As your scripts grow, you will organize them using functions with local variables and helper libraries. The course then tackles advanced stream control, showing you how to merge output streams, provide multiline input, observe data with tee, and strictly fail a pipeline when any stage fails. Because shell scripts can easily cause destructive errors, a dedicated module covers writing safer automation by protecting caller-provided paths, detecting unset variables, cleaning up temporary directories, and tracing execution. Finally, you will apply everything to real-world capstone automations, writing scripts to normalize file sets, render configurations from inputs, turn logs into health decisions, and assemble deployment bundles.