Proposed Changes to shell-novice: Shell Scripts - Instructor Checkout

[rbartelme]

This episode could use more of an emphasis on why we are teaching and could introduce best practices at the end...

1. Why might we want to reuse commands? This is not at the beginning of the episode.
2. the history | tail -n 5 > redo-figure-3.sh example seems out of place. The example is "We’d like to be able to re-create the graph later if we need to, so we want to save the commands in a file." While this is true that this analysis can be run to generate a graph, is this common practice?
3. Links at the end of the episode to best practices for writing bash scripts (i.e. using shebang at the beginning of a file, what are permissions, how can we make a script executable with chmod, etc.)

[gdevenyi]

Hi. Thanks for the suggestions.

We would welcome a PR demonstrating the proposed changes to the lesson.

[rbartelme]

@gdevenyi hoping to get to this in a bit when I have more time.

[clizarraga-UAD7]

It is a common practice to write Shell scripts to automate repetitive tasks.

If it is desired to have a singe line sequence of commands, we can use the ';' symbol to execute the 'chmod u=rwx' command to change permissions to an executable shell script, ..

history | tail -n 5 > redo-figure-3.sh; chmod u=rwx *.sh

that way, the shell script is an executable file by the user.