Welcome to the initial post of the blog I am calling standard in.

The idea of this blog is to keep track of all the cool software development stuff I learn in 2017.

My goal is to post 5 times per week. Each post will be a short snippet that represents something I learned that day.

To kick it off, today I learned how to debug bash scripts. I previously relied on echo abuse to print the value of variables as a script ran. It meant adding, then deleting, many lines of code and carefully avoiding typos. Now, I know to use one of these techniques instead:

  • set the -x switch at the top of the file (next to #!/bin/bash)
  • use set -x and set +x to turn debugging on and off inside a script
  • or just run the script by passing -x as an option: bash -x myscript