Bash Paste

Shell is the language people share in the most hostile places: a Slack DM that turns $VAR into a mention, a wiki that smart-quotes your " and ' so the command no longer runs, an email that wraps a long find ... -exec across lines and breaks it. files.link gives you a paste link that renders Bash, sh, and zsh through highlight.js with the dangerous details intact — variable expansions, single vs double quoting, pipes and redirects, command substitution, heredocs, and # comments all keep their exact characters and pick up readable coloring.

The coloring earns its keep on the things that bite: spotting that a glob isn't quoted, that a $(...) is nested wrong, that a heredoc delimiter doesn't match, or that someone used == where = belongs in [ ]. A one-liner you're handing to a teammate, an install sequence for a README, a reproduction of a flaky CI step, a set -euo pipefail script you want reviewed — each reads clearly on the paste page and survives copy-paste into the recipient's terminal exactly as you wrote it.

A word on curl | bash: the paste *view* is an HTML page, so piping the view URL into a shell would pull markup, not a clean script — don't do that. If you want a URL that's genuinely safe to curl | bash, host the script as a file via the upload API (POST /v1/files/{folderId}, PUT the bytes, POST /v1/files/confirm-upload) and pipe the resulting CDN URL, which serves the raw bytes with no HTML wrapper. Use a paste for *reading and reviewing* a script; use a hosted file for *executing* one.

No account is needed to create or read. Anonymous pastes hold 100KB and expire after 24 hours, which suits the throwaway 'here, run this' moment. Sign in for 1MB and a choice of expiry up to permanent, so a documented install snippet keeps resolving. Compared to a Slack code block — invisible outside your workspace, gone with the scrollback — or a Gist that demands a login to post, a paste link opens for anyone and renders the script faithfully.