bashwizard.com is a website and blog with stuff about bash.

Almost 20 years ago I realized that bash is one of the most accessible tools out there. It was installed on all Linuxes, on some BSDs and even on some other Unix or Unix-likes. But at the same time it was – and still is – one of the most underutilized tools.

In the early 2000s there was no Stack Overflow. There was, however, Google, but not too many bash experts out there. So I had two choices: either work around problems with lots of pipes to grep, awk and sed, or learn the bash guide from the TLDP. I chose the first one, just like everyone else.

The only piece of documentation to answer my bash problems was the mighty man bash. There were guides out there, but mostly for beginners. I was reading tens of kilobytes of text but only finding one or two new things. And not even exciting ones. All this had to come to an end. This is why bashwizard.com was created.

In the today’s ever-changing software development environment, we all come across bash every time you need to glue two pieces together in a DevOps pipeline, or a build script, or anywhere you need automation.

Bash is more than a command line prompt or interpreter. It’s a programming language which is capable of performing as good as Python or other similar programming languages.

I am Alin Dobre and my mission is to bring the programming side of Bash into the spotlight. I have almost 20 years experience in writing shell scripts. I never use Stack Overflow to find answers to my bash questions, I only use the bash manual. That said, I still get surprised from time to time by some undiscovered bash feature, which keeps me motivated to carry on.