Over the past 20-ish posts, we’ve learned about:

  • the sed command, what it does, and how it’s used.
  • finding all the interpretations of a command (not just the first one) via the type command’s -a flag
  • finding the canonical path (not just a symlink) via the type command’s -P flag
  • trimming text with the tr command
  • getting just the filename from a path/to/filename using the basename command
  • the awk command, what it does, and how it’s used.
  • using the shell’s hash feature to save time when looking up the locations of command files
  • using the trap command to tell Bash to execute arbitrary logic when the shell receives certain signals
  • what shell signals are, and some common examples
  • finding the difference between two files using the diff command
  • filename expansion (aka “globbing”) using the * symbol plus shopt -s nullglob
  • building arrays in Bash, using parentheses (ex.- foo=(1 2 3 4 5)).
  • iterating over arrays in Bash, using parameter expansion (ex.- for item in ${foo[@]}).
  • the advantages of testing behavior vs. testing implementation
  • unsetting shell variables via the unset command
  • testing whether a variable is set to an empty string using +x inside parameter expansion, i.e. [ -n "\${RBENV_VERSION_OLD+x}" ]
  • expanding escape sequences using dollar signs plus single quotes, i.e. $'\r'
  • how to sort lines in a file using the sort command, including how to specify multiple sort keys (with the -k flag) and non-default delimiters (with the -t flag)
  • Using indirect parameter expansion via "${ ... }" plus ! to turn a named variable passed as an argument into the argument’s value.
  • How to use ANSI-C quoting to ensure that Bash interprets escape sequences (such as \n) as special characters, instead of literal characters.

There’s a few more directories to cover, but they’ve each only got a few files in them:

  • The rbenv.d/ directory
  • The completions/ directory
  • The .github/ directory
  • The src/ directory
  • A few files in the root project directory:
  • .gitignore
  • LICENSE

We’re in the final stretch. Let’s move on to the final section.