Linux Gazette: The Deep, Dark Secrets of Bash Jul 8, 2000, 18 :56 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (4570 reads) (Other stories by Ben Okopnik)
"Deep within the bash man page lurk terrible things, not to be approached by the timid or the inexperienced... Beware,
Pilgrim: the last incautious spelunker into these mysterious regions was found, weeks later, muttering some sort of strange
incantations that sounded like "nullglob", "dotglob", and "MAILPATH='/usr/spool/mail/bfox?"You have mail":~/shell-mail?"$_
has mail!"'" (He was immediately hired by an Unnamed Company in Silicon Valley for an unstated (but huge) salary... but
that's beside the point.)"
"The built-in parsing capabilities of bash are rather minimal as compared to, say, perl or awk: in my best estimate, they're not
intended for serious processing, just "quick and dirty" minor-task handling. Nevertheless, they can be very handy for that
purpose.
As an example, let's say that you need to differentiate between lowercase and capitalized filenames in processing a
directory - I ended up doing that with my backgrounds for X, since some of them look best tiled, and others stretched to
full-screen size (file size wasn't quite a good-enough guide). I "capped" all the names of the full-sized pics, and "decapped"
all the tiles. Then, as part of my random background selector, "bkgr", I wrote the following..."
"There are times - say, in testing for a range of error conditions that set different variables - when we need to know whether a
specific variable is set (has been assigned a value) or not. True, we could test it for length, as I did above, but the utilities
provided by bash for the purpose provide convenient shortcuts for such occasions..."
"Another built-in capability of bash, a basic mechanism for handling arrays, allows us to process data that needs to be
indexed, or at least kept in a structure that allows individual addressing of each of its members. Consider the following
scenario: if I have a phonebook/address list, and want to send my latest "Sailor's Newsletter" to everyone in the "Friends"
category, how do I do it? Furthermore, say that I also want to create a list of names of the people I sent it to... or some other
processing... i.e., make it necessary to split it up into fields by length, and arrays become one of the very few viable options.
Let's look at what this might involve..."
