Topic: Bash Shell Presenter: Brian Gerard When: Thursday, 14th August 2014, 7pm (pizza from 6.45pm) Where: NC State Engineering Building II Room 1021, Centennial Campus Parking: The parking decks and Oval Drive street parking are free after 5pm Map: Google Maps Video: YouTube Slides: PDF and code on GitHub

Synopis: As Linux users, we spend a lot of our time on the command line, in the shell. And the most popular shell in Linux-land is bash, GNU's Bourne-Again shell. Many users never move beyond the simple execution of a few well-known commands, but there is a lot more that can be done if you learn how.

In this talk, we will go over some less-frequently-used options to some well-known commands and show how they can be put together into more powerful command line constructs. From there, we will explore some of the more useful built-in features of bash and demonstrate how they can be assembled into new commands.

The goal is to give the audience a glimpse into the real power of bash, along with some guidance on how to incorporate some of that power into their own environments and daily workflows.

Bio: Brian Gerard has been working with various *nixes, and Linux specifically, since the mid-'90s, as a Systems Administrator, a Software Engineer, and an end user. After eight years developing abuse defenses for Yahoo! and training their engineers, he now uses his expertise doing deployment automation and security work for WebAssign.

Whatever the role, throughout his career he has found the shell to be an invaluable tool; first using csh, eventually moving to tcsh, and finally (after a friend made it his personal mission to get him to switch), bash. His startup files are the stuff of legend, he has more aliases than your average mafioso, and his prompt decorations have been known to bring tears of joy to the eyes of even the most jaded of sysadmins.