Bash overview

Bash (Bourne Again SHell) is the default command interpreter on most Linux systems and macOS. It is used for scripting automation tasks, CI/CD pipeline steps, system administration, and gluing together CLI tools via pipelines and process substitution. Key features include here-documents, arrays, associative arrays, arithmetic expansion, brace expansion, and the rich set of POSIX utilities (awk, sed, grep, find) commonly used alongside it. ShellCheck is the standard linter. Bash scripts are ubiquitous in DevOps, cloud infrastructure, and system administration contexts. For complex logic, Python or Go is often preferred, but Bash remains essential for environment setup, build scripts, and one-liners.