Debugging and Best Practices

Part of the Bash course

At some point a script you wrote will do something you did not ask it to do. It will delete the wrong file, skip the loop you were sure it would run, or silently produce an empty result. You will read it line by line, decide it looks correct, and be no closer to an answer. The problem is almost never that Bash is broken.

Imagine handing a recipe to a cook who silently substitutes ingredients before starting. You read your recipe, they cook a different one, and the dish comes out wrong. Tracing is asking that cook to read each step out loud, with the substitutions already made, right before doing it. Bash has this built in. ...