There are a few shellisms that have bitten me over the years. One issue that has bitten me more than once is the interation of variable assignments when a pipe is used to pass data to a subshell. This annoyance can be easily illustrated with an example:
$ cat test
#!/bin/bash
grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo | read stat total size
echo $total
$ ./test
On first glance you would think that the echo statement would display the total amount of memory in the system. But alas, it produces nothing. The reason this occurs is because the grep output is piped to read which is run in a subshell. Read assigns the values passed from grep to the variables, but once read is finished the subshell it is running inside of will exit and the contents of stat, total and size will be lost.
To work around this we can implement one of the solutions proposed in the bash FAQ. Here is my favorite for cases similar to this:
$ cat test
#!/bin/bash
foo=$(grep MemTotal /proc/meminfo)
set -- $foo
total=$2
echo $total
$ ./test
8128692
This works because the output is stored in the variable foo and processed inside the current shell. No susbshells are created so there is no way for the variables to get nuked. If you haven’t read the bash FAQ, gotchas pages or Chris Johnson’s book you are definitely missing out. I still encounter goofy shell-related issues but am now able to immediately identify most of them since I’ve flooded myself with shell-related information. :) So what is your biggest annoyance with the various shells?