PBS 149 of X — Better Arguments with POSIX Special Variables and Options

Programming By Stealth

English - April 16, 2023 20:46 - 1 hour - 80.5 MB - ★★★★★ - 14 ratings
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Previous Episode: PBS 148 – A Bash Potpourri (Subshells, Relative Paths & More)

Next Episode: PBS 150 of X – Bash Script Plumbing (Take Two)

In this rather mind-bendy episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes into the weird world of POSIX special variables and options. He refers to some of them as being like handling nuclear power, at one point he suggests mind-altering drugs must have been involved in the design, and he even compares one of our newly learned tools to a chainsaw.

He powered us through amidst my many interruptions with questions to where we can now write shell scripts that take flags and optional arguments using `getopts`. The final form of the syntax is very readable but knowing the reasons behind each bit is crucially important.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_04_15