Choosing when to apply Bash

There are some tasks for which shell scripting in general, and Bash in particular, are especially well-suited:

• Prototyping: Short Bash programs are quick and easy to write. It's quite common to "hack together" a simple script in Bash for later replacement by a script or program in a more advanced programming language that requires more effort to write and maintain.

• Interactive system administration: A Bourne-style shell is assumed in very many contexts in Unix, and almost all of the system documentation you read will tell you to issue commands in a Bourne-style shell. This makes it a natural choice for a scripting language.

• Automation: If you have a set of commands you often run together, making a script for them is as simple as writing them all into a text file, each on a new line, and making that file executable.

• Connecting programs together: Like all Shell scripting languages, Bash specializes in moving data to and from files and between processes. Many programs are designed to work together in this way.

• Filtering and transforming text input: Some programs, however, aren't designed to cooperate in this way, and they require some data filtering and transformation in the middle. Bash can be a very convenient language for doing this, and it's also a good language to call other tools such as awk or sed to do it for you.

• Navigating the Unix filesystem: In Bash, it does not require much code to navigate and iterate through the filesystem, discovering, filtering, and processing files within it at runtime. Coupled with the find tool, especially a high-powered version such as GNU find, a lot can be done in a pattern over a filesystem with relatively little code.

• Basic pattern-matching on strings: Bash has features that make it good for basic pattern-matching on strings, especially filenames and path names, with parameter expansion.

• Portability: Bash works on and is packaged for a huge variety of Unix-like systems. POSIX shell script is even more widely supported. If you need to know your script and its runtime will remain portable to many Unix-like systems, Bash might be a good choice.