bash-shortening

Make Bash scripts shorter without making them harder to read. Source: 51 techniques from Karandeep Singh's "Bash Code Shortening" article, codified here as a cheatsheet plus categorized references.

Philosophy

Shortening is about expressing intent, not saving keystrokes. The win is fewer moving parts (subprocesses, temp files, intermediate variables) — not denser code per line. A 7-line script that creates a temp file and deletes it is worse than a 1-line pipeline; a cryptic ${1:-${X:-${Y/-,/ }}} chain is worse than three clear lines.

Two heuristics decide every call: