Shell
Check and change your shell
$ echo $SHELL
$ echo $0
Change your default shell (e.g. to zsh):
$ chsh -s /usr/bin/zsh
POSIX Shell
The POSIX (the Portable Operating System Interface) shell is the standard Unix shell, i.e. it was formally defined and shipped in a published standard, it has many competing implementations on many different operating systems, but are compatible.
POSIX shell is basically Bourne shell, lives at the standardized location /bin/sh.
The POSIX standard does not recognize long flags like grep --file=FILE, but only the short flags like grep -f. (Because it does not define getopt_long function, only getopt function).
Bash: Bourne Again Shell
In many Linux distros, bash is the default shell, and /bin/sh is symlinked to /bin/bash.
Bash is not standardized, but there's only one implementation of bash (i.e. bash is defined by its implementation).
Shebang
The #! is called a shebang. Scripts will execute using the interpreter specified on a first line.
Make Shell Script Portable
If you use the POSIX shell /bin/sh, just add #!/bin/sh to the top of your script. The location is standardized.
If you use other shells, e.g. bash, use #!/usr/bin/env bash instead of #!/bin/bash as shebang. Because bash is not always in the same location. If you have multiple versions of a shell installed, use env will make sure the first executable in the PATH will be used.
Set Environment Variable
$ x="hello" y="world" bash -c 'echo $x $y'
hello world
bash -c: "commands are read from the first non-option argument command_string. If there are arguments after the command_string, the first argument is assigned to 0 sets the name of the shell, which is used in warning and error messages."
sshuttle
Allows you to create a VPN connection from your machine to any remote server that you can connect to via ssh.
You must have root access on the local machine, but you can have a normal account on the server.
Shortcuts
grep | wc -> grep -c
sort | uniq | wc -> sort -u | wc