General tips and tricks

For the first part of this chapter, we'll describe a few things we could not place properly in others parts of the book. With the exception of the first subject, arrays, both history and alias are not really used in a scripting context so we elected to present them here. But first, arrays!

Arrays

If you come from a developer background or have dabbled in programming, you will have (probably) come across the term array. If we needed to explain arrays in a single sentence, it would look like this: Arrays allow us to store a collection of data of the same type. To make this a little less abstract, we'll show you how we can create an array of strings in Bash:

reader@ubuntu:~$ array...