Resources

One line: Every claim in this library can be checked against a manual. The list below says which manual stands behind which chapter, and every lesson links the sibling page that covers the same idea in another library.

The manuals

The shells

• Bash Reference Manual ↗ covers pipelines, redirections, history, the prompt, and every shopt. man bash on a Linux machine is the same text; on a Mac, man bash describes 3.2.
• The Z Shell Manual ↗ covers redirection with MULTIOS, history options, and prompt expansion with %.
• fish documentation ↗, and above all fish for bash users ↗, which is the page to read when a bash line does not work in fish.
• POSIX Shell Command Language ↗ is what bash, zsh and /bin/sh all promise to agree on, and fish deliberately does not.

The tools

• GNU grep manual ↗ and the FreeBSD grep(1) ↗ page cover the two greps chapter 04 compares.
• GNU coreutils: tee ↗ and tr ↗.
• fzf ↗: the README, the search syntax, and the shell integration behind Ctrl-R.
• od has no chapter here, because the encodings library already has the page: od reads types, not bytes ↗. Its section Reading a textbook's od session ↗ works through the Tevault book's od chapter on macOS and Ubuntu. It shows the UTF-8 BOM behind 357 273 277, GNU od masking the high bit under -t a where BSD od does not, and -j0000640 being octal because of its leading zero.

Books

• The Ultimate Linux Shell Scripting Guide, Donald A. Tevault (Packt, 2024). The book whose pages prompted chapters 01, 02, 03, 04, 08 and 10; chapter 10 starts from its Table 2.1, File type designators. It is written on Fedora in bash, and this library checks what changes on a Mac and in fish. Its chapter 7, "Using od", is covered by the encodings library's od page ↗.
• The Linux Command Line ↗, William Shotts, free online. Redirection, pipelines and the prompt, from the beginning.
• Efficient Linux at the Command Line, Daniel J. Barrett (O'Reilly, 2022). Pipelines as a way of thinking, plus a good chapter on history.

Sibling libraries

Same house style, same answer-key contract:

• C ↗ — what a file descriptor, a pipe and a terminal are to the program on the other end.
• Encodings ↗ — bytes on a pipe. Its terminal chapter ↗ and tools chapter ↗ are the closest neighbours of this library.
• Python ↗ — stdin, stdout and pipes ↗, from inside a Python program.
• Perl ↗ — the one-liner, a whole language in the middle of a pipeline.
• Ruby text ↗ — Perl's switches, kept.
• Rust ↗ — its Unix chapter ↗ sets up fzf's key bindings in fish, bash and zsh.