BASH Programming

At the this month's GTALUG meeting, Chris F. A. Johnson gave a talk on BASH programming. Chris is one of our shell programming experts and is the author of Pro Bash Programming, so I knew the talk would be informative. While most of us write simple shell scripts for automate everyday tasks, Chris uses BASH for all his application development whether trivial or complex.

BASH never appealed to me as a general programming language for one reason only: it use too many special characters as syntactic sugar. It is the same reason I never took to Perl, TCL, and even Ruby. But that's just aesthetics and has nothing to do with the capabilities of the language. And, as Chris showed us tonight, BASH is plenty capable of doing everything that you might need for writing real world applications.