Expand Your Test, Embrace Your Bash - Dominic Kua

Talk Description

Testers work best being creative and inquisitive. We’re creatures who thrive on the new and the question “What if?”, But often setting things up to see what if and examining them to see what has actually happened is long and tedious work. It doesn’t have to be.

Many of us have access to the Bash terminal emulator and the suite of Unix commands that it offers us. Whether it’s through the Windows Subsystem for Linux, natively on MacOS and Linux on the desktop or in Linux machines in the cloud, many testers have access to a powerful, flexible and free suite of tools that they might not know about. This talk will explain a few of the more common and useful Unix tools, like ls, grep, xargs and how you can use them in concert to automate find and replace across gigabytes of files, or extract and log only the relevant error messages from an application’s output in real-time.

We’ll explain how to chain commands together using the mythical pipe operator, what you can do with punctuation to make your life easier and give you a taste of the scope of what’s possible with Unix commands.

Takeaways

• Learn how to use curl, grep, ls, cat, xargs, echo and tee.
• How to use the pipe operator to pass data between these tools.
• How to get help, man pages and the -h argument.
• How to use punctuation to expand, recover and augment your command chains
• What the next steps are: Bash scripting and execution.

What you’ll learn

By the end of this talk, you'll be able to: