Effective Shell

by Dave Kerr

July 2025, 472 pp

ISBN-13:

9781718504141

Download Chapter 1: Flying on the Command Line

Look Inside!

One trait that defines great technologists is their ability to make their tools work for them by adapting the tools to their unique styles and needs. This book will help you do just that by using the shell. Investing a few hours in learning the command line techniques in Effective Shell will have a huge impact on your productivity. It will also make your work more fun. The shell’s simple text-based interface lets you maintain a state of creative flow, free from the distractions of a graphical environment.

This isn’t a book on shell scripting or Linux administration. Each chapter presents a stand-alone set of techniques to help you work more efficiently, understand your system better, and tailor your environment to your individual workflow. This book doesn’t ask you to totally change the way you work or drop your current tooling. Instead, it brings together a set of skills that you can add to your toolkit and incorporate as you like.

The author focuses on the essentials that allow you to immediately apply the new skill rather than describing every possible feature. The goal is for you to be able to pick up the book, read a chapter over coffee, and try out what you’ve learned right away.

Author Bio

Dave Kerr is a technology consultant and software engineer. He's worked across the world with diverse engineering teams, helping people write better software and companies build a better place for awesome engineers to work. Dave is a passionate geek who loves coding, devops, writing and coaching. When he can get away from his computer, he loves anything outdoors.

Table of contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction

Part I: Core Skills
Chapter 1: Flying on the Command Line
Chapter 2: Thinking in Pipelines
Chapter 3: Finding Files

Part II: Manipulating Text and Streams
Chapter 4: Regular Expression Essentials
Chapter 5: Getting to Grips with grep
Chapter 6: Slicing and Dicing Text
Chapter 7: Advanced Text Manipulation
Chapter 8: Building Commands on the Fly

Part III: Shell Scripting
Chapter 9: Shell Script Fundamentals
Chapter 10: Variables, Reading Input, and Mathematics
Chapter 11: Mastering Conditional Logic
Chapter 12: Using Loops with Files and Folders
Chapter 13: Functions, Parameters, and Error Handling
Chapter 14: Useful Patterns for Shell Scripts

Part IV: Building Your Toolkit
Chapter 15: Configuring Your Shell
Chapter 16: Customizing the Command Prompt
Chapter 17: Managing Dotfiles
Chapter 18: Controlling Changes with Git
Chapter 19: Managing Remote Git Repositories and Sharing Dotfiles

Part V: Advanced Techniques
Chapter 20: Understanding Shell Expansion
Chapter 21: How to Avoid Scripting
Chapter 22: The Secure Shell
Chapter 23: The Power of Terminal Editors
Chapter 24: Mastering the Multiplexer

Appendix A: Setup
Appendix B: Shell Basics
Index

The chapters in red are included in this Early Access PDF.