In October of 2015, Bart and I started a podcast called Taming the Terminal. It’s a fantastic and (mostly) evergreen series that helps demystify the Terminal. It’s not just for macOS users. Whenever possible, Bart included Linux and Windows commands. With the advent of the Windows Subsystem for Linux, it became even easier for Windows people to join in the fun.
The show ran for 40 installments, and at that point in 2020, Bart had taught us everything he had planned. He purposely named every installment in the format, “40 of n”, never defining “n” even when we stopped making new installments. He said he wanted to leave it open for when there were new things to teach.
After we concluded, I conspired with the wonderful Helma van der Linden to create a book of all the lessons. I was sort of the “idea woman” where Helma did 99.7% of the heavy lifting. She made the book available for Kindle, Apple Books, and as an online version.
Ok, now that we’re done with the history lesson, I’m telling you all of this to announce that we have a new installment of Taming the Terminal! The installment (41 of n) is entitled “Protecting Your Secrets”.
In this installment, Bart teaches us how to protect our secrets while working in the Terminal. Secrets can include passwords, API keys, and any other sensitive information you’d like to protect. Without the tools Bart teaches us, any secrets you type into the Terminal will be in your history file in plain text, and with AI, possibly hoovered up as training data.
You’ll hear me say the last episode was in 2022, but it was actually 2020.
As always, you can find Taming the Terminal in your podcatcher of choice. You can also follow along in the online book at ttt.bartificer.net/…, which gives you Bart’s fabulous tutorial shownotes. You even get an embedded player there too.
You can download the fre Taming the Terminal book at podfeet.com/tttbook. All of the versions are up to date with the new chapter, except Apple Books. As of 18 December 2025, the one in Apple Books is “in review” with the new chapter. Hopefully, by the time you look for it, they will have deemed that chapter worthy of inclusion. I just noticed that it’s available in Apple Books in 51 countries!