I spent the last few days working my way through William Shotts' introduction to the shell and bash shell scripting.

Two reflections:

First, it really is a wonder how I managed to go through such a large portion of my life, not noticing the power of the command line interface. (I'm forty.) It's so useful!

Second, a neat feature of the bash shell is brace expansion.

Brace expansion allows you to concisely print a range of characters.

~ $ echo {1,2,3}
1 2 3
~ $ echo {1..5}
1 2 3 4 5
~ $ echo {A..C}
A B C
~ $ for char in {a..c}; do
> echo $char
> done
a
b
c

This will come in handy managing my homelab, I'm sure.