The Bash Programming Language

Published on 09 May 2018 (Updated: 15 May 2023)

Welcome to the Bash page! Here, you'll find a description of the language as well as a list of sample programs in that language.

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Description

Bash is a command language first released back in 1989. Despite its age, Bash is still heavily maintained with changes tracked in git.

In terms of features, Bash supports variables, piping, globbing, control flow, and even iteration. Of those features, perhaps the coolest is globbing, also known as wildcard matching. Globbing can be used to retrieves sets of files that match a wildcard expression.

Beyond that, Bash is ubiquitous in the Linux/Unix/Mac communities. After all, it's the standard shell on most systems. In fact, it even has support on Windows 10. That means shell scripts are fairly portable. However, users will have to pay attention to code that doesn't conform the Bourne shell standards.

You'd be hard pressed to find a popular system that doesn't support Bash today. Even Jenkins, a continuous integration utility, supports Bash scripting during builds.

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