Zero to Hero Bash
Build a Real Backup Tool, One Commit at a Time
Learn Bash the way it should be taught: by building one real, tested backup tool — not toy examples — one Git commit at a time.
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About
About the Book
Zero to Hero Bash teaches you Bash the way you'd actually learn it on the job: by building one real program, one deliberate step at a time.
Over 10 chapters and 8 milestones, you'll build backup_docs.sh — a script that finds documents on a Windows file share and copies them safely to an external drive — while surviving everything that goes wrong in the real world: dead networks, unplugged drives, typo'd config files, and file names with spaces.
Every chapter follows one rule: no line of code without a story of the failure it prevents. Instead of "this is best practice, just do it," you'll see the actual bug each safeguard exists to stop, then build the fix yourself.
By the end, you'll have:
- A working, ShellCheck-clean, test-covered backup tool you built yourself, line by line
- A Git history that mirrors a real 28-commit teaching repository, so you can compare your work commit-by-commit against a working answer key
- The habit of writing scripts that stop when something is wrong, instead of silently continuing
The book covers strict-mode fundamentals, logging, config file loading, CLI argument parsing with getopts, preflight connectivity checks, the array-as-command pattern for building shell-safe rsync commands, error traps, and a full Bats test suite — plus five appendices (glossary, header cheat sheet, ShellCheck reference, commit map, and notes for teachers running this as a course).
A companion GitHub repository with the finished, working code is included, so you can check your progress against real commits at every step.
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About the Author
Muhammad Y. Rasheed is a systems administrator working in Linux system administration, virtualization, and network infrastructure, with a long-running homelab practice spanning Proxmox, Docker, and VPN/tunneling setups, ..etc. He was born and raised in Iraq — ancient Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, where writing and the first codified laws began — and traces a direct line from that tradition to his own work: turning operational knowledge earned the hard way into something written down, tested, and repeatable. Zero to Hero Bash began as backup_docs.sh, a production backup tool he built for his own infrastructure, with a Git history designed from the start to double as a teaching path. He treats "boring" infrastructure work — backups, logging, error handling — as the most important code in any system.
Contents
Table of Contents
Copyright and License
Why This Book Exists (A Word From the Trenches)
About this book
Chapter 0 — Your Workshop
Chapter 1 — A Script That Can’t Lie
- Milestone 1: entry point + strict mode
Chapter 2 — Teaching the Script to Talk
- Milestone 2: logging module
Chapter 3 — Settings Live Outside the Code
- Milestone 3: config loading
Chapter 4 — Listening to the User
- Milestone 4: argument parsing with getopts
Chapter 5 — Look Before You Leap
- Milestone 5: the preflight gate (SMB connectivity checks)
Chapter 6 — The Actual Backup
- Milestone 6: disk-space check + rsync core
Chapter 7 — When Things Break Anyway
- Milestone 7: ERR and EXIT traps
Chapter 8 — Prove It Works
- Milestone 8: tests with bats-core
Chapter 9 — Graduation
- One Step From the Full Picture
Chapter 10 — From Classroom to Production
- Bonus chapter: the finished project, and the first real backup run
Appendix A
- Glossary (student words)
Appendix B
- The header, memorized
Appendix C
- ShellCheck codes met in this course
Appendix D
- The answer-key commit map
Appendix E
- Notes for teachers and study groups
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