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---
layout: page
title: The Bash Guide
subtitle: A quality-driven guide through the shell's many features.
editable: false
---

<section>

    <p>This guide is an introduction to basic and advanced concepts of the bash shell.</p>
    <p>It teaches both newcomers and long-time users the best ways to write safe and robust bash scripts, and how to interact efficiently and speedily with the shell as a command line interface.</p>

    <h2>Authorship</h2>
    <p>The primary author and maintainer of this guide is <a href="https://www.lhunath.com">lhunath (Maarten Billemont)</a>.</p>
    <p>For many years I've worked as a volunteer educator, attempting to assist users with their shell scripting problems. During that time I found that most of them held serious misconceptions about the shell, largely due to the the widespread publishing of naïve advice, poor practices, and often outright misinformation. I also found an acute lack of reliable, clear, and accessible information to improve their knowledge, and so I decided to write this guide.</p>
    <p>This guide is open source, licensed under <a rel="license" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License</a> (CC-BY-SA).  The source code is available at <a href="https://github.com/lhunath/guide.bash.academy">GitHub</a>.  Go there to report issues or fork the guide to contribute changes (big or small).  To keep up to date with new chapters or improvements to this guide, you could star the GitHub project.</p>
    <p>For advice, comments, suggestions, corrections or recommendations, contact lhunath, <a href="https://github.com/lhunath/guide.bash.academy/issues">file an issue</a> or visit <a href="ircs://irc.libera.chat:6697/#bash">the Libera.chat #bash community on IRC</a>.
    <p>This guide has gone through several iterations and is a continuing active work in progress.  New chapters are being written and existing chapters are continuously being updated and improved.</p>
    <p>In writing this guide, I am sharing my knowledge and expertise with the world freely in the hopes of benefitting you and all others like you.  If you've benefitted from the knowledge and experience gained through this guide, consider "giving back" to encourage a society of open access and freedom of information.  You can give back by providing feedback on the guide at the GitHub project page, making corrections by hitting the <em>edit</em> buttons on the chapter pages, sharing this
    guide with any of your friends that have similar interests so that they too may learn as you have, or contributing financially in gratitude for my work, time and effort put into writing and maintaining this guide.</p>

    {% include contribute.html %}

    <p><a rel="license" href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="https://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/4.0/88x31.png" /></a></p>

    <h2>Exercises</h2>
    <p>After introducing new practical concepts, the guide offers a set of exercises to allow you to practice your new knowledge.  For a summary of all exercises in this guide, see <a href="exercises">our exercises index</a>.</p>

    <h2>Chapters</h2>
    <ol id="chapter_list">
        {% assign chapters = site.pages | where: 'layout', 'chapter' | sort: 'chapter' %}
        {% for chapter in chapters %}
            <li><label for="done_{{ chapter.id }}"><input type="checkbox" id="done_{{ chapter.id }}"> I'm done</label>
                <a href="{{ chapter.url }}">{{ chapter.title }}</a><sup>{{ chapter.status }}</sup>: {{ chapter.subtitle }}
                <p>{{ chapter.description }}</p></li>
        {% endfor %}
    </ol>

</section>