Once upon a time I had to learn to script in bash. I’m still learning, as with most people, but I’m feeling pretty comfortable. I often have people ask me what is the easiest way to learn scripting and I find myself telling people to use the history command. Much of what people need beyond simply looking at their bash history involves variable substitution, loops and regular expressions. Tackled separately this makes a palatable experience. So then what makes object-oriented or interpretive languages such as perl or python so much more difficult? Is it the lack of a bash history? Let’s try and exercise and see about that. Open a…