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… ...

No. 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.

Learn how to use the timeout command in Bash scripts to prevent infinite loops when waiting for a service to come online.