About this collection
About the insectarium
Who collects, how the site is put together, and where the sister collections live.
The Bash Insectarium is the third stickybit collection made of lots of little pages. The HTML Herbarium presses markup elements; the Shell Reliquary keeps the symbols of history expansion; this insectarium pins down the tiny operators of everyday bash — small, numerous, ignored, essential to the ecosystem.
The 28 specimens were checked against the GNU Bash manual, the source pointed to on each label, with a note whenever zsh welcomes them too. The rarity classification is the curators' opinion.
Everything here is generated by gen_insetario.py, a Python script a few hundred lines long, in the same spirit as Jim Nielsen's Lots of Little HTML Pages: every state is a page, every page is a file, and not a byte of JavaScript is served.