Shells like Bash or Zsh are advanced and user-friendly, and include features beyond what a simpler POSIX-compliant shell might offer. You will do well to utilize the full features of your shell when writing scripts.

There are situations, however, when portability should be a valued feature, allowing the script to run on a variety of shells. ...more

I prefer to stay on the command line when creating a new repo, rather than going back and forth between Github’s web interface and the command line. Here are the steps I use when creating a new project. ...more

After exploring portable scripting in the previous article, I built a container available on Docker Hub, useful for testing and experimentation. ...more

Have you ever wanted to execute one command if another failed? Or one command only if the first one succeeded? What about background execution?

Bash and other popular shells such as Zsh and Ash/Dash have some useful but sometimes confusing operators for command execution. ...more

Most popular Linux distributions use systemd as the init system. It is like a Swiss-army knife that controls startup, shutdown, service monitoring, and so much more.

In late 2022 Microsoft announced systemd support in WSL.

Prior to that point, however, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) danced to its own initialization tune, and distros running on WSL did not use systemd, and did not generally employ a traditional init system.

This taught folks like me something: I don’t always need to have systemd or other init system for a good Linux experience. Running WSL without systemd is OK. ...more

I am very happy with Linux on my Dell XPS 13 9310. I use the latest version of Fedora (38 at the time of this writing).

However, the Wi-Fi connection gave me great difficulty for months before I learned that performance is much better with the power saving functionality turned off. With power saving on, I would often lose packets right and left. Here are the steps to fix this. ...more