Ah, for me one of the biggest reasons to use shell is that I use it every day to just do stuff in the terminal, so it's great to use that knowledge in scripts,

Ah, for me one of the biggest reasons to use shell is that I use it every day to just do stuff in the terminal, so it's great to use that knowledge in scripts, too. But yeah, some of the syntax is quite obscure. That kind of reference guide would be great. I haven't checked out any of the books on shell programming, but there should be a decent audience for a website with just good patterns for shell scripts, like you describe. Trapping signals and keeping track of child PIDs is quite tricky, yeah. (It's quite tricky in any language!) You might be interested in my "wd" program that's basically a bash wrapper for the WebDriver API, which I made because I wanted to write end-to-end tests and automation tools in shell. https://github.com/mbrock/wd https://github.com/mbrock/wd