Learning about Bash building a Terminal Timer

Countdown timers, Bash, and Bread

With life being quite slow just now, I’ve had the chance to play around with bash scripting a little bit.

Bash still baffles me more often than not, but today I completed a little project. A while ago I was working and minding my lockdown sourdough bread at the same time. Often that works like a tasty pomodoro technique for me but that day I was zoning out a lot and couldn’t find my phone to set alarms with. Since I had a bunch of terminals open anyway I looked for a simple bash script to display a countdown- and didn’t find one I liked.

My impression of bash scripting is that it can do amazingly powerful things and then at the same time needs incredibly convoluted expressions for things that would take one line in Python.

So I made a thing, maybe someone will find it useful:

https://github.com/lschwetlick/tertletimer