Back to how we can improve the readability of our scripts. While commenting is a great way to improve our understanding of a script, if the commands in the script use many obscure flags and options, we need many words in our comments to explain everything. And, as you might expect, if we need five lines of comments to explain our commands, the readability becomes lower instead of higher! Verbosity is the balancing act between not too much but also not too little explanation. For example, you will probably not have to explain to anyone if and why you are using an ls command, since that is very basic. However, the tar command can be quite complex so it might be worthwhile to give a short comment about what you're trying to achieve.

In this context, there are three types of verbosity we want to discuss. These are the following:

• Verbosity in comments
• Verbosity of commands
• Verbosity of command output