As developers, operations engineers, system administrators, or hackers, the shell is often one of the first "power tools" we learn and bash is often the first shell we learned. I'll take a short walk through the history of the shell as an interface, how user innovations at University of California, Berkley and Massachusetts Institute of Technology led to the rich ecosystem of user-space tools we work with every day, and how bash helps spackle over some of the differences in platforms with a rich library of built-in functionality.

This will be a low-to-mid level technical talk with some small demos or examples. It will be appropriate for all skill levels, with a focus on topics that will be most applicable to a beginner-to-intermediate audience interested in expanding their understanding of shell scripting, with a firm emphasis on bash and common (but not ubiquitous) third-party utilities available on all major Linux platforms.