PLAY PODCASTS
PBS 149 of X — Better Arguments with POSIX Special Variables and Options

PBS 149 of X — Better Arguments with POSIX Special Variables and Options

Programming By Stealth · Allison Sheridan

April 16, 20231h 27m

Audio is streamed directly from the publisher (media.blubrry.com) as published in their RSS feed. Play Podcasts does not host this file. Rights-holders can request removal through the copyright & takedown page.

Show Notes

In this rather mind-bendy episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes into the weird world of POSIX special variables and options. He refers to some of them as being like handling nuclear power, at one point he suggests mind-altering drugs must have been involved in the design, and he even compares one of our newly learned tools to a chainsaw.

He powered us through amidst my many interruptions with questions to where we can now write shell scripts that take flags and optional arguments using `getopts`. The final form of the syntax is very readable but knowing the reasons behind each bit is crucially important.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_04_15