Question

I have recently started moving into the world of Linux development. I wanted to learn some new things and thought bash might be fun. As I learn more about bash programming I have found that there are quite an assortment of useful tools to be used (such as grep, tr, awk, etc.) There are so many that I just do not know which ones are ‘vital’ to learn.

Shell scripting commands depend heavily on the configuration of the system itself, and can change drastically over time, unlike most programming languages (where a core library ships with the language itself and represents the ‘core’ set of commands that a programmer would use when interacting with the outside world). Therefore,

As a modern Linux shell script programmer, which command line tools should I be familiar with?

Answer 1

• Compressing and uncompressing various archives.
• Using the man pages
• alias is always helpful
• as mentioned by others sed & grep (RegEx is good to know in general), sort, head, tr, cut
• echo & printf (their differences and when to use what)
• Getting the return value (not as useful but still handy when writing scripts) via $?
• top, ps, kill, how to background/foreground/suspend a process

The important thing is combining the many tools that exists and where most become extremely useful. Using man whenever you are stuck is probably the most important thing.