The power of the shell Thursday Dec 19 10:06:30 2019 The power of the shell precisely lies in the fact that it is truly powerful. This might sound plain silly and perhaps apologetic in a way, but to tell you the truth the more I use the shell programming language the more I realize how great it is. I am just a hobbyist and I must admit that the shell is very limited when it comes to do certain things, but on the other hand if you know those limitations and you can adapt to them, and even live with them you may have a great coding experience. I have written about the power of the shell on other occasions, but let me tell you where this is all coming from once again: Lately I have been building a website for my family and friends. I didn't want to install a CMS so I decided to use plain html and a little bit of php just to make it a bit more dynamic. Well, once the site is up and running, the hardest part is as usual adding content and keeping the site up to date. So to make my life a bit easier I wrote several scripts to automatize the process of updating the web page. While writing the code I was constantly asking myself, how will the shell interpret my commands? how can I be sure the result will be what I am expecting? And the conclusion as always is try and see, experiment, play, read, learn, do research and have the time of your life with it. The power of the shell is there to help you write powerful scripts.