TL;DR

An invaluable resource to do POSIX shell programming a bit safer.

Some time ago I discovered Rich’s sh (POSIX shell) tricks - a page that I find so useful that it’s worth putting a link to the copy in the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.

There’s some ranting about using the shell for programming, and I agree. There’s also some ranting about being at the same level of Perl, which I don’t agree by today’s standards - I guess it’s OK to not agree on everything 🙄.

If I had to only highlight one and only one thing, it’s the first hint (Printing the value of a variable). Since I’ve read it, I’ve started avoiding echo completely, for the more type-unfriendly but safer:

printf '%s\n' ...

I guess it’s all for today!