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Questions tagged [bash]

This challenge is related to the Bash (Bourne Again SHell) language. Note that challenges that require the answers to be in a specific language are generally discouraged.

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0 votes
2 answers
258 views

The many ways to skin a `cat` [duplicate]

The well known cat command simply copies its stdin directly to stdout unchanged. But there are plenty of other commandline tools that exist... What other commands ...
CarmenCarmen's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
224 views

Most elegant one-liner to generate sqlite INSERTs

Challenge You find yourself in a bash terminal, and want to do some simple tests on sqlite3. So you issue the following command: ...
ChrisB's user avatar
  • 119
9 votes
5 answers
569 views

Shortest way to convert the result of a test to a string output (e.g. true or false) in bash

I'm trying to shorten a bash solution to a Code Golf challenge, which requires an output of true or false. I've managed to ...
ShadowRanger's user avatar
-5 votes
4 answers
286 views

tail: troll: file truncated

Background When you run tail -f file in bash, the file is outputted and then any subsequent appends. However, when you remove something that has already been ...
user avatar
8 votes
1 answer
591 views

Code Golfing Split String in Bash [closed]

Let us play a little golfing game. Given a single line of N space separated numbers from STDIN, one must output those numbers on N lines. So far, I came up with the three following bash solutions : ...
Brett's user avatar
  • 89
5 votes
4 answers
510 views

Shorter way to assign a default value to the standard output stream

I have this code : tr ' ' '\n'|sort -n|head -1 The code is pretty simple, it takes a list of integer in the standard input stream (like ...
Magus's user avatar
  • 153
12 votes
1 answer
590 views

Write a panic script to remote secure a Mac Pro from an untrustworthy local user [closed]

The Situation Suppose I allow "Shady Sam" admin access on my workstation to perform an important administrative task on my Mac Pro for me by giving them a temporary root login password. (Assume they ...
jvriesem's user avatar
  • 299
70 votes
43 answers
12k views

Tips for golfing in Bash

What general tips do you have for golfing in Bash? I'm looking for ideas that can be applied to code golf problems in general that are at least somewhat specific to Bash (e.g. "remove comments" is not ...
manatwork's user avatar
  • 20.6k