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by kazinator 2011 days ago
Read the whole POSIX specification for the "Shell Command Language", and in particular how input is processed by the shell through all the multiple expansion passes.

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/V...

From there, you have a better background for reading the documentation of shell implementations, like Bash.

Also study Awk:

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/utilities/a...

Those who don't know Awk do comical things with cockamamie combinations of cut, sed, grep, echo ... and clumsy loops written in shell.

Other than shell syntax and semantics, it's a matter of knowing a large number of utilities.

1 comments

I find Perl to be good for these things.
That is, or was, Perl's purpose, right? Process pipelines of text data but in a more structured way?