So, if you haven’t seen this page you should take a look. It has a whole bunch of interesting techniques you can use to manipulate strings in bash. If you end up working with bash a lot you might find yourself doing this quite a bit, since it can save a lot of time.
Lets take a pretty typical task, stripping the domain off of an email address.
So this poorly written program will split an email address at the first @ and print the first portion:
Its counterpart, which does not fork, uses a bash built-in to remove everything after the @:
So, whats the execution difference?
Its a 100x faster to skip the fork.
Now, granted this is a pretty dumb example, and its easy to rewrite this to perform better than the bash example (i.e. don’t use a loop and just use awk which is 3x faster than the pure bash solution). So, think about what your doing, use a pipe over a loop, and if you can’t do that, try to find a built-in that can take care of your needs.