General Meeting - Michael Potter - Seatbelts and Airbags for Bash

The VanLUG General Tech meetings are held every 3rd Monday of the month. These meetings feature guest speakers on various FLOSS and Opensource topics of interest to the Linux community. Later we socialize at a nearby establishment.

Our next monthly meeting will be held on Monday, January 16, from 7:00-9:30pm in Room HC2945 at SFU Harbour Centre, 515 West Hastings Street.

Our speaker this month currently hails from Georgia. Michael Potter has been working in IT since 1989 when he switched from programming automotive embedded systems. Since that time he has been involved in projects related to migrating mainframe applications to Linux. It was during these migration projects that he found the solutions to fixing bash's weaknesses. Most recently creating iPhone and Android apps for Insurance Companies. Michael's topic will be "Seat Belts and Airbags for Bash"

You will use what you learn in the presentation the next time you write a bash script. This presentation will focus on the underutilized features of bash that are critical to building production quality scripts. Demos will show you how to turn on options and error trapping that expose the hidden time bombs in the code. Turning these features on should be considered a requirement, much like turning on strict and warnings is considered a requirement for Perl programs. Also, as much of the bash syntax has become outdated, the presentation will explain which syntax is best to use and which syntax to avoid. Knowledge of any of the common UNIX scripting languages will be sufficient to understand the presentation and script authors at all proficiency levels should find value in attending. Although the presentation does not address differences between Korn shell and bash, much of what will be discussed also applies to Korn shell.

Sound interesting? Hope you can make it. As usual, we'll adjourn to a nearby establishment after the meeting.

Bill