A semantics for Bash scripts?

Question

More than any other language I know, I\'ve \"learned\" Bash by Googling every time I need some little thing. Consequently, I can patchwork together little scripts that appea

Answer 1

The bash manpage has quite a bit more info than most manpages, and includes some of what you're asking for. My assumption after more than a decade of scripting bash is that, due to its' history as an extension of sh, it has some funky syntax (to maintain backward compatibility with sh).

FWIW, my experience has been like yours; although the various books (e.g., O'Reilly "Learning the Bash Shell" and similar) do help with the syntax, there are lots of strange ways of solving various problems, and some of them are not in the book and must be googled.