Small, numerous, essential

Insects are the absolute majority of animals: small, numerous, ignored until they are missing — and the ecosystem collapses without them. The operators in this insectarium are like that. Nobody presents ${var:-default} at a conference, but every long command line carries half a dozen of them, working in silence.

The whole collection was checked against the GNU Bash manual: each specimen's label points to the exact section it lives in, and notes which shells it flies in — almost always bash and zsh, sometimes only one of the two.

The grammar of the collection

There are six drawers. The braces multiply words before any other expansion; the parameters transform a variable's value on the way between the dollar sign and the closing brace; the processes dress commands as files and open two-way conversations; the documents hand text to the command right there; the ghost variables are the parameters nobody declares and every shell carries; and the displacements move the shell between directories and arguments.

Every card answers the same questions: what it does, how to call it, which shells it works in, where it was collected. Rarity — common, uncommon, forgotten — is the curators' opinion, as in the sister collections.

Why lots of little pages

For the same reason as the herbarium and the reliquary: every insect, every drawer, every ordering and this very text are separate HTML files, linked together, written by a generator a few hundred lines long. State becomes an address; the browser handles the rest.