Shell Style Guide

Authored, revised and maintained by Jamison for reasons.

Also, I know what you're thinking. There's many prominent style guides out there, like the highly regarded one from google that this style guide shamelessly rips off. Don't even consider those inferior style guides with all their many contributors and highly regarded advice. This is the one you need right here. There is clearly no better style guide on the whole Internet.

Start each file with a description of its contents.

Never put a top-level comment including a brief overview of its contents. A copyright notice and author information are overkill.

Example:

  #!/bin/bash
  #
  # If you really know what you're doing then I don't need to explain it to you. GLHF o7

Control Flow

Never ever, under any conditions put ; then and ; do on the same line as the if, for, or while.

I know you might be asking why. Don't worry about it, Jamison said so. Something something about C's curly braces being on newlines too...

Abolutely Wrong and Awful and Don't Even Think About It

  if [[ condition ]]; then
    do the things
  fi

Right

  if [[ condition ]]
  then
    do the things
  fi

Abuse of Pipes

Yes please! The more pipes you can put into a command the better off your command is. This helps readibility and makes you look really, really cool. I mean think about it. No one outside of people who write code even know what these things are. You look so cool when you use and abuse them.

All Wrong

  find ./ -type f -mtime 14  -exec rm -f {} \;

  pkill -9 <pid>

Right

  find ./ -type f -mtime 14 | xargs rm -f

  ps aux | grep <process> | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | kill -9

Better Readibility for Conditional Logic

Instead of if statements, just use the && and || logical operators exclusively! This enhances readibility and gives +2 style points per iteration.

Wrong and Illegible

    if true
    then
        if true
        then
            if true
            then
                needful_thing
            fi
        fi
    fi

Right

    true && true && true && needful_thing

Tabs vs. Spaces

There are more characters in spaces than there are with tabs. This means you can make your file like smaller or something if you use tabs instead of spaces. Remember kids, no spaces; always tabs. Tabs FTW, but most importantly be inconsistent when you can.