In this rather mind-bendy episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots takes into the weird world of POSIX special variables and options. He refers to some of them as being like handling nuclear power, at one point he suggests mind-altering drugs must have been involved in the design, and he even compares one of our newly learned tools to a chainsaw.

He powered us through amidst my many interruptions with questions to where we can now write shell scripts that take flags and optional arguments using `getopts`. The final form of the syntax is very readable but knowing the reasons behind each bit is crucially important.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_04_15

This week's Programming By Stealth is a great lesson on how no matter how long you've been coding, you'll still get caught out from time to time and think that the universe makes no sense. When Bart was working on the challenge from PBS 147, he ran into a bizarre situation for many hours. He eventually figured out what was going on, but it changed this installment into a walk down what went wrong, what he learned, and gave him the opportunity to teach us even more about shell scripting.

The entire installment is all about the solutions to the challenge from PBS 147 so you might want to take a shot at it yourself before listening to or reading this week's installment.

Before we get started, I also explained how we now have a terrific way to share our work on the challenges, through a GitHub Organization called pbs-students. I wrote it up in the article entitled [Introducing the Programming By Stealth Student Organization in GitHub](https://www.podfeet.com/blog/2023/03/pbs-students-github)

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_03_25

Join our Slack at podfeet.com/slack and look for the #pbs channel, and check out our pbs-student GitHub Organization. It's by invitation only but all you have to do is ask Allison!

In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart walks us through how to create, add to, and extract from arrays using Bash. It's a very light episode, which I manage to drag out longer by making him slow down and dig into the syntax used for arrays. It's not just me being dense (this time), there are squirrely brackets, square brackets, single quotes, double quotes, and the good old octothorp thrown in for some extra fun.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

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As Bart continues our education in shell scripting, he explains the simplicity of looping. He explains the four types of loops: while, until, for, and select, along with the simple syntax of do/done within a loop. He walks us through a lot of examples that illustrate how each one of these loops work. He ends by giving us a challenge, because teacher's pet Allison asked for homework last time.

Enjoy this episode along with Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_03_04

Bart continues his miniseries on shell scripting by teaching us conditionals in the shell. In order to explain why conditionals are a bit odd in shell scripting, Bart first walks us through how it was originally done and then shows us the evolution to a much better method. It's still weird, and many things are opposite of what you'd expect (like 4 is actually > 10), but he gets us there in the end. I was most excited to finally learn what `fi` means, which shows up in shell scripting and I'd seen before in AppleScript.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_02_18

This week our guest is Bart Busschots with Programming By Stealth 144. When last we recorded, Bart started teaching us the basics of shell scripting using Bash. We learned how to collect terminal commands into a reusable shell script, but we didn't learn how to accept any kind of input.

In this installment, we learn how to take inputs either from the execution of the command or from user input and how variable names are created for the different ways of receiving input. We also learn about Exit Codes, which are really error codes, and how they can be used in boolean logic.

This knowledge will come into play when we learn next time about how to do conditionals and loops. It's a short episode, and as Bart says, "not a heavy lift."

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_02_04

In this week's episode of Programming By Stealth, Bart Busschots starts building out one more tool in our toolbox: shell scripts. Bart starts with the basics explaining how to tell our little scripts which shell to run using the shebang line, the structure of shell scripts, commenting, assigning, and using variables, and how to write strings without having to escape every space and unusual character.

Throughout the installment, Bart refers back to things we learned in Taming the Terminal podcast and tutorial. If you haven't listened to or read this series, you can download the book Helma helped us to produce using the Apple Books Store, or access it in a beautiful HTML version at [ttt.bartificer.net/...](https://ttt.bartificer.net/book.html), both of which have the audio of the podcast embedded within. You can find even more formats at [podfeet.com/tttbook](https://www.podfeet.com/blog/download-ttt-book/).

Read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2023_01_07

In this week's installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart officially kicks off the XKPasswdJS project. This is what we've all been waiting for! As I said to Bart at the end of our recording, we're no longer fixing to make a plan, we _have_ a plan. The shownotes for this episode point to the README file for the GitHub project.

Bart explains n the podcast that we'll have a project skeleton phase where Bart will define the code that has to be ported from Perl to JavaScript, and he'll build the guidelines that will help us work as a team of contributors. This means things like a style guide, automated scripts to build the project, and configuration files for the tooling.

He has a vision that we'll work on the direct port next, with no enhancements and I tried to get him to take a dollar bet on whether that goal will be achieved, but he didn't fall for it. After that, we'll go into maintenance mode.

It's a fun episode because we're finally moving forward after learning all of the tools we'll need to make the project a success!

You can find Bart's shownotes that point to the README at pbs.bartificer.net.

I'm having a bit of trouble with the transcripts but by the time you read this, you _might_ be able to read an unedited, auto-generated transcript: CCATP_2022_12_10

In the last installment of Programming By Stealth, Bart taught us all about UML class diagrams for documenting the structure of our code. In this installment, Bart teaches us how to use the ASCII diagramming tool Mermaid to make our class diagrams. The advantage of Mermaid over a graphical tool to make our diagrams is that we'll be able to use Git to do version control for them. I think the most important part of this installment was when we learned that we shouldn't ever cuddle the mermaid.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.

Bart and I are back from summer vacation to kick back into gear on Programming By Stealth. As you may remember, we've been learning all of the tools we'll need to rewrite, test, and document Bart's password generation library xkpasswd from perl to JavaScript. In order to start the rewrite, we need to understand the structure of the code we're going to write, and instead of writing up a long text requirements document, we're going to use a standard software diagramming language called UML Diagrams. In particular, we're going to be using UML Class Diagrams.

Bart will probably do most of the diagramming himself as he dusts off decades-old code but we need to learn how to read UML Class Diagrams ourselves, so it will be another tool in our toolbelt.

Most podcasts would stick to everyday examples, but not here at the Podfeet Podcasts. Instead, Bart will teach us some Particle Physics along the way and you get that for free with this installment of Programming By Stealth.

You can find Bart's fabulous tutorial shownotes at pbs.bartificer.net.