Best of Bash 2026 Edition

Once the everyday Bash commands are familiar, the command line has plenty more to offer. Best of Bash 2026 Edition gathers practical articles on lesser-known utilities, modern replacements for classic tools, and scripting techniques that help Linux users approach common tasks in fresh ways.

The issue ranges from small workflow improvements to broader system-administration topics. Explore tools for navigating directories, searching files, and renaming batches; then move into security, networking, performance tuning, and data work. It is aimed at readers who already have a grounding in Bash and want to extend their working toolkit.

Find smarter tools for familiar tasks

Articles introduce modern takes on commands such as ls and find, as well as utilities including zoxide and rename. The emphasis is on practical command-line options for everyday Linux work, from finding files to handling groups of filenames.

From system maintenance to network tools

System-focused coverage includes the Tiger security-auditing tools, Linux performance tuning, firewall basics, and temporary virtual machines for testing. Networking articles consider Netcat and Socat, while a Bash web-maintenance feature uses familiar text tools to locate and address broken links.

Put data and documents to work

The data and text articles introduce utilities for examining tabular data, carrying out calculations, extracting information from XML, HTML, and JSON, and converting documents with pandoc. There is also coverage of searching scanned PDFs and managing printing from the shell.

Go further with Bash scripting

Advanced scripting articles look beyond introductory shell work at automation techniques and at embedding other scripting languages to handle tasks Bash does not address as directly. Together, the topics offer Linux users a varied reference for exploring command-line tools and approaches across administration, networking, and data processing.

If your next step is to make the terminal a more capable part of your Linux workflow, this special issue brings a broad set of tools and techniques into one place.