Have you ever stared at a large directory of file names and dreaded the idea of renaming them all? Or perhaps your scripts are littered with conditional statements checking to see if an environment variable exists. Bash provides a concise syntax for changing strings that makes life easier. They're called parameter expansions, and I'll show you how to use them.

You've probably written dozens of Bash scripts by now. You may have used grep in a conditional statement or sed to transform small blocks of text inline. What if I told you that's incredibly inefficient? Bash provides built-in utilities to handle these cases, but they're infrequently utilized, so let's fix that.