In this day and age of automation, automating repetitive and mundane tasks is highly valued to developer productivity and efficiency. Tasks like user management and creating backups, though simple, can eat away a lot of time and effort to execute.
While the regular tasks get memorized rather quickly, the not-so-frequent ones are spaced far enough to make you have to figure out everything all over again. While one way to document these “steps” involved is to write it out on a piece of paper or the computer Notepad, a better approach is creating a shell script of the steps, which can be effortlessly executed as and when required.
As the default command language used on most Linux systems, Bash is one of the most popular scripting languages used. It is used to write scripts that can automatically perform a sequence of commands to accomplish the required task.
If you are still not convinced, here are some reasons you should take Bash seriously:
- Managing programs/settings is easier: Bash makes it easy to control different programs running on the system. This level of control is advantageous to execute programs or processes which run in the background and often do not have a graphical user interface (GUI). Additionally, Bash also lets you manage settings and permissions at a granular level.
- Working with files is easier: Datastorage is commonly in text files, making them easy to manipulate with a language like Bash. With its straightforward CLI, Bash makes it easy to process text at advanced levels, like those used in Data Science.
- Instructions as Code: Bash scripts convert the set of instructions or command into a piece of immutable code that can be executed as and when required with the assurance that it will always provide the same output. This method becomes useful for auditing and debugging.
- Not hardware intensive: Bash works directly at a system level with minimal resources required for execution, unlike resource-heavy GUI interfaces. The lower resource dependency means that the execution speed is much higher for Bash scripts with significantly lower latency. This comes in handy when working on a system with low-grade hardware, like the raspberry pi. While this is beneficial on local systems, it becomes critical when working with remote systems.
- Gateway to Cloud services: Speaking of working with remote systems, command-line is the default interface when working with cloud services. With most of the systems migrating to the cloud and advanced services like infrastructure management and deep learning being embedded on the cloud, Bash’s knowledge holds high importance.
All of this shows the importance of Bash Scripting and how important it is for a developer to learn it. It is no wonder that Bash is still listed in the top 10 languages used by developers in the 2020 Stack Overflow Developer Survey. Interestingly, it is also associated with higher salaries compared to even more popular languages, including Python.
So, if you plan to start your Bash journey or want to brush up on your Bash skills, head over to Learn Chef and enroll for the Bash Scripting Basics course.
