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Bash Quick Start Guide

You're reading from   Bash Quick Start Guide Get up and running with shell scripting with Bash

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Product type Paperback
Published in Sep 2018
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781789538830
Length 186 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Tom Ryder Tom Ryder
Author Profile Icon Tom Ryder
Tom Ryder
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Table of Contents (10) Chapters Close

Preface 1. What is Bash? FREE CHAPTER 2. Bash Command Structure 3. Essential Commands 4. Input, Output, and Redirection 5. Variables and Patterns 6. Loops and Conditionals 7. Scripts, Functions, and Aliases 8. Best Practices 9. Other Books You May Enjoy

Documenting scripts

Just as with any kind of programming, it's important to write some documentation to help your users understand and run your program, and to know all of its available features. We'll look at three documentation methods: writing comments, providing help output, and writing manual pages.

Writing comments

It's good practice to add comments to any code to explain what it's doing to the curious (or debugging) reader, and Bash is no exception. Keep your comments concise, up-to-date, and most of all, useful. Remember: don't just rephrase what the code is doing; explain why you're doing it, not just what it does.

Consider this comment and line of shell script:

# Loop to end of positional...
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