PBS 152A of X — Bash: xargs & Easier Arithmetic

I don't always make the time to pre-read the shownotes for Programming By Stealth but I never regret when I do make the time. That was especially true this week. In this installment, Bart Busschots takes us through his solution to the challenge from PBS 151, which was to print a "pretty" multiplication table using the `printf` command.

Being Bart, he didn't just make the columns line up nicely, he took it up a notch and added ASCII characters that build a nice border and corners around his table.

The reason I said it was good I pre-read the shownotes is that while nearly everything he explains in this lesson was a reuse of things he's taught us before, the commands are so dense in Bash that it was particularly hard to read and comprehend. We had also taken 4 weeks between lessons which made it even harder to remember.

Because I told Bart ahead of time that I was going to be stopping him to ask lots of questions, we decided to skip the one main topic he had planned to explain - `xargs`. This means that the next installment will start with `xargs` as Programming By Stealth 152B using the same shownotes. I'm really glad we did it this way because instead of you having to listen to a confused and thus frustrated Allison, the lesson flows well with me having time to ask the right questions.

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