This is a tutorial for bash by Adam Janin. It is intended for people who have a passing familiarity with bash (e.g. you know what a path is, cd ~/git/bash_tutorial makes sense to you, etc.). It is inspired by Unix for Poets by Ken Church (probably from the early ’90s), but has been updated for more modern sensibilities.
mkdir -p ~/git
cd ~/git
git clone https://github.com/ajanin/bash_tutorial.git
cd bash_tutorial
Many formats are supported. For plain text, read tutorial.md. For HTML, open tutorial.html in your browser. If you’re really old fashioned, you can print tutorial.pdf.
You should have a terminal window with Bash open and be in the top level directory of the repository (the one with the file wotw.txt.gz), as the tutorial expects you to be interacting with Bash and using the files in this repo as you’re reading.
You can read the HTML on github: README.hmtl tutorial.html
This section contains notes on how the tutorial was assembled and how to regenerate some of the files (e.g. if you fork). Most readers needn’t continue.
The source for the tutorial is tutorial.md. It’s written in Pandoc’s markdown format. This is reasonably easy to read as plain text, but other formats are easy to generate with Pandoc. I generate the various format with the commands:
docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/data -u $(id -u):$(id -g) pandoc/core -s -H style.html --metadata pagetitle="Bash Tutorial" -o tutorial.html tutorial.md
The file 1000_words.gz is an extract of word counts I had lying around from a web
scrape. I removed words with apostrophes for pedagogic reasons.
The files words1 and words2 were generated with:
gunzip -c 1000_words.gz | shuf -n 10 | tee >(shuf -n 5 | sort > words1) | shuf -n5 | sort > words2
Yes, I really do write one-liners like that routinely!