It is easy to dismiss bash — the typical Linux shell program — as just a command prompt that allows scripting. Bash, however, is a full-blown programming language. I wouldn’t pres… ...

But it will catch things that you might not find for quite some time after deploying a shell script. If you don’t think you can do a lot in a bash script, think again.

Each of the four numbers has a valid range of 0 to 255. The following bash script contains a bash function which returns true if it is passed a valid IP address and false otherwise. In bash speak true ...