To cap our week on shell scripting, I am going to share with you my five shell one-liners that saved me time.

Before long, every Linux user accumulates little command snippets. A clever find pipeline copied from a forum. A five-line shell script that renames photographs. An awk one-liner that extracts exactly the report you need. The question is not whether you will collect these solutions. The question is whether you will lose them.

This post continues the discussion on shell scripting. In a sense, a shell script is simply text that instructs other text-processing tools how to cooperate.

How does one become a programmer? Based on my own experience, this is all about agency—the moment you stop waiting for software to exist and start creating software that fits your own way of working. The key is discovering that if configuration isn’t enough, you can write the missing tool yourself.

This week’s book helps every textsmith to understand shell scripting—the subject we had been dealing with starting last week. It also complements Efficient Linux at the Command Line by moving from using the shell effectively to teaching it to work for you.