Chapter 15: Troubleshooting Shell Scripts

If you have come this far, you must have a lot of ideas about how to write a shell script, and even more questions about the ways you can make particular things in scripts work. This is completely normal. Your scripting journey has just started. No amount of reading can make up for time spent writing scripts, trying out different solutions, and understanding how different commands work.

We have some good news and some bad news for you. Being good at scripting takes a long time and, in scripting, most of that time is going to be spent trying to understand what your script should be doing and, usually, why it is doing it wrong. The good news is that scripting is never boring.

In this chapter, we will try to give you the tools needed to debug and troubleshoot scripts quickly and without a lot of confusion. The tools are going to be in the form of different methods you can use to maximize your ability to find logical and, sometimes, syntactical...