The Shell Hater's Handbook
summary
Claims that the shell is a special‑purpose language where the fundamental abstraction is the command not traditional expressions, shows that test is an external program (so [ ... ] invokes /bin/[), points out RVM and Git contain large amounts of shell, cites bash man ≈40,000 words vs dash ≈10,000, and builds a working pipeline (curl → tr → grep/sort → uniq -c → sort -rn) to produce word frequencies. Recommends POSIX/sh docs as the minimal, portable reference and shows the approach actually works.
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chapters (11)
- 0:00Start
- 0:32The Unix Shell
- 2:15Modes of Operating
- 17:06Building Commands
- 18:35The Shell Haters Handbook
- 21:50Sort the Output
- 23:30Documentation Problem
- 24:22Bourne Shell
- 24:51Special Purpose Languages
- 25:43Modern Shells
- 28:16Posix Shell
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