Bash is a shell and command language. It is distributed widely as the default login shell for most Linux distributions. We've rounded up some of the most popular Bash-related articles for your weekend reading.

Writing More Compact Bash Code

By Mitch Frazier

In most programming languages, non-scripting ones at least, you want to avoid uninitialized variables. In bash, using uninitialized variables can often simplify your code.

Normalizing Filenames and Data with Bash

By Dave Taylor

URLify: convert letter sequences into safe URLs with hex equivalents.

Roman Numerals and Bash

By Dave Taylor

Fun with retro-coding a Roman numeral converter—Dave heads back to his college years and solves homework anew! 

Also read Dave's followup article, More Roman Numerals and Bash.

Create Dynamic Wallpaper with a Bash Script

By Patrick Wheelan

Harness the power of bash and learn how to scrape websites for exciting new images every morning.

Developing Console Applications with Bash

By Andy Carlson

Bring the power of the Linux command line into your application development process.

Parsing an RSS News Feed with a Bash Script

By Jim Hall

I can automate an hourly job to retrieve a copy of an RSS feed, parse it, and save the news items to a local file that the website can incorporate. That reduces complexity on the website, with only a little extra work by parsing the RSS news feed with a Bash script.

Hacking a Safe with Bash

By Adam Kosmin

Being a minimalist, I have little interest in dealing with GUI applications that slow down my work flow or application-specific solutions (such as browser password vaults) that are applicable only toward a subset of my sensitive data. Working with text files affords greater flexibility over how my data is structured and provides the ability to leverage standard tools I can expect to find most anywhere.

Graph Any Data with Cacti!

By Shawn Powers

Cacti is not a new program. It's been around for a long time, and in its own way, it's a complicated beast itself. I finally really took the time to figure it out, however, and I realized that it's not too difficult to use. The cool part is that Cacti makes RRDtool manipulation incredibly convenient. It did take me the better part of a day to understand Cacti fully, so hopefully this article will save you some time.

Reading Web Comics via Bash Script

By Jim Hall

I follow several Web comics. I used to open my Web browser and check out each comic's Web site. That method was fine when I read only a few Web comics, but it became a pain to stay current when I followed more than about ten comics. These days, I read around 20 Web comics. It takes a lot of time to open each Web site separately just to read a Web comic. I could bookmark the Web comics, but I figured there had to be a better way—a simpler way for me to read all of my Web comics at once.

Note: This article was originally published March 2018 and updated with additional and more current articles January 2019.