Why is shell scripting given so much importance? I see lot of shell scripting tutorials online as well. How much shell scripting knowledge should a developer have?

Here's how I'd break down my reasoning on why learning bash is important; • One of the first thing a developer does is solve their own problems by instructing a computer to do something. • Traditionally, Bash (i.e. any POSIX compliant command line environment) is one of the first things you get to interact with, some times even before you learn any new programming language. • CLI tools that come with bash are native binaries (unlike most high level programming languages which are often interpreted and run on a managed VM), so a script you write to do something with those tools will be much, much faster than an equivalent program. • Bash scripts are portable (as long as you run it on POSIX compliant environment), hence your solution doesn't have to depend on availability of certain language compiler/interpreter. As for how much a developer should know, there's no limit to it really. One can be constantly learning new stuff in bash, and it is never too late or too early to start with it. 🙂

Thanks a lot Kushal for detailed answer. Got your point 🙂