Effective Shell

A Practical User's Guide to Working Smarter on the Command Line

by Dave Kerr

July 2025, 472 pp

ISBN-13:

9781718504141

Download Chapter 1: Flying on the Command Line

Look Inside!

Effective Shell is the hands-on guide for developers who want to master the command line—not just to get around, but to build a fast, flexible, and portable development environment.

This isn’t a tour of shell commands. It’s a blueprint for creating workflows that scale across machines, teams, and projects. You’ll go from keystroke-level efficiency to composing powerful pipelines, writing reliable scripts, and automating common development tasks. Then you’ll take it further: managing your configuration with Git, customizing your shell setup, and working seamlessly across remote sessions using tools like Vim and tmux.

By the end, your shell won’t just be a tool; it’ll be an extension of your thinking.

You’ll learn how to:

Find, filter, and reshape data using grep, regular expressions, and shell pipelines
Write scripts that automate setup, configuration, and repetitive tasks
Create Python-based CLI tools to pull and process structured data
Manage your environment with Git and version-controlled dot files
Edit quickly with Vim and multitask efficiently using terminal multiplexers
Use AI tools to generate commands, debug faster, and enhance automation

Rather than prescribing a one-size-fits-all toolkit, Effective Shell teaches you the tools, practices, and strategies to build a shell environment that fits the way you work—efficient, portable, and entirely yours.

Whether you’re leveling up from the basics or refining your craft, this book will help you think clearly, automate confidently, and work more effectively in the shell.

Author Bio

Dave Kerr is a software engineer and consultant with over 15 years of experience helping teams design modern platforms, scale infrastructure, and automate everything from deployment to developer onboarding. He has led high-stakes engineering initiatives, from launching digital banks to building telco backends, and today focuses on agentic AI, developer experience, and open source. Outside the terminal, you’ll find him in the mountains or clinging to a rock face.

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 with sed
Chapter 8: Building Commands on the Fly

Part III: Shell Scripting
Chapter 9: Shell Script Fundamentals
Chapter 10: Using Variables to Store, Read, and Manipulate Data
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 Your Command Prompt
Chapter 17: Managing Your Dot Files
Chapter 18: Controlling Changes with Git
Chapter 19: Managing Remote Git Repositories and Sharing Dotfiles

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

Afterword: Generative AI and the Shell
Appendix A: Setup
Appendix B: Shell Basics
Index

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