Tools of the Trade I’ve recently made an introductory post on what knowing some bash can do for automating many system tasks. It showed some of what’s possible, but didn’t describe the imperative nature of having the proper ancillary tools in your environment that are crucial to writing quality bash. Beyond your text editor of choice (come to the dark side and use vim or neovim already if you haven’t), you’re going to want these tools.

What is it? Bash is the Bourne Again SHell. It was made in 1989 as a replacement for System 7 UNIX’s Bourne shell and is part of the GNU project. Since then, it has become ubiquitous in the Linux world as the default shell in nearly every Linux distribution. For most Linux users, it’s worth while becoming acquainted with it. It’s power is in automating system management tasks and various other things.

What is Raku and What are its Features? Raku (also known as Perl 6) is an interpreted language designed to accompany (rather than replace) the much older Perl 5. The specification has been in the works for nearly two decades, but the first releases only started being published less than 5 years ago. There have been some salient improvements in Raku that we’ll take a look at Static typing Raku allows the user to declare static types if they choose.