I don’t write very small shell scripts because I am not a job destroyer.
This is why I finally switched to nushell.
I love Nushell
I’d been considering it for awhile, but thought it wasn’t worth the trouble of switching until I realized just how often I do things the tedious manual way because writing a bash script to do it is so arcane
I’ve switched to nutshell imo. Bash is in need of a replacement
There’s always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: “If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you’ll wish you wrote it in a real programming language.”
I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like “Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell.” …around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It’s no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It’s got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.
I consider python a scripting language too.
They’re all programming languages, they all have their places.
All scripting languages are programming languages but not all programming languages are scripting languages
I use it for scripting too. I don’t need Python as much as before nowaday.
I initially read “UNIX jungle” as “UNIX jingle” and thought I had been really missing out!
You have, look up the SuSE songs.
Unironically love powershell
For a defacto windows admin my Powershell skills are…embarrassing lol but I’m getting there!
And I thought I was the only one… for smaller bash scripts chatGPT/Deepseek does a good enough job at it. Though I still haven’t tried VScode’s copilot on bash scripts. I have only tried it wirh C code and it kiiiinda did an ass job at helping…
AI does decently enough on scripting languages if you spell it out enough for it lol, but IMO it tends to not do so well when it comes to compiled languages
I’ve tried Python with VScode Copilot (Claude) and it did pretty good
Yeah I tried that, Claude with some C code. Unfortunately the Ai only took me from point A to point A. And it only took a few hours :D
That’s because scripted languages are more forgiving in general.
I was chalking it up to some scripting languages just tending to be more popular (like python) and thus having more training data for them to draw from
But that’s a good point too lol
Both can be true, Python does have a lot of examples floating online.
to be honest I agree and thought we would be using something more intuitive by now
I think the cool kids are using Nu now
Everything is text! And different programs output in different styles. And certain programs can only read certain styles. And certain programs can only convert from some into others. And don’t get me started on
IFS.
Today I tried to write bash (I think)
I grabbed a bunch of commands, slapped a bunch of “&&” to string them together and saved them to a .sh file.
It didn’t work as expected and I did not, at all, look at any documentation during the process. (This is obviously on me, I’ll try harder next time)
I try to remember to use man when learning a new command/program. And I almost always half-ass it and press the search button immediately to find whatever flag i need.
Remember to make the .sh file executable with chmod +x
Je comprend tellement! Je répond en français pour ma première réponse sur Lemmy juste pour voir comment ça va être géré!
Si yo también comprendo, qué necesidad de comentar todo el tiempo en anglais?
En un mundo ideal. Todo se traduciría automáticamente del idioma original al idioma del lector y viceversa
¿No nos volvería lentos y flojonazos? (not a real word if you translate, more like slang meaning to be really lazy)
I so understand! Answering I. French for my first Lemmy reply just to see how it’s handled.
Realizing now that language selection is mainly for people filtering. It be cool if it auto translated for people that need it.
every control structure should end in the backwards spelling of how they started
Once you get used to it it is kind of fun.
Shame about
dothough.it could have been
notsince there’s notry.
Or it’s because other people are assholes. And write shit garbage. And then you go to fix a bug or add an enhancement. And then you are stuck.
No, Makefile syntax is more extreme.
Sure, but bash is more relatable, I think
I swapped from Make to Just: https://github.com/casey/just
Way better, IMO. Super simple logic, just as flexible.
I find
Makefileisn’t too bad, as long as I can stay away fromautomakeandautoreconf.
I feel same with regex…
Any no-SQL syntax for interacting with databases.
So true. Every time I have to look up how to write a bash for loop. Where does the semicolon go? Where is the newline? Is it terminated with
done? Or withend? The worst part with bash is that when you do it wrong, most of the time there is no error but something completely wrong happens.It all makes sense when you think about the way it will be parsed. I prefer to use newlines instead of semicolons to show the blocks more clearly.
for file in *.txt do cat "$file" doneThe
doanddoneserve as the loop block delimiters. Such as{and}in many other languages. The shell parser couldn’t know where stuff starts/ends.Edit: I agree that the
then/fi,do/donecase/esacare very inconsistent.Also to fail early and raise errors on uninitialized variables, I recommend to add this to the beginning of your bash scripts:
set -euo pipefailOr only this for regular sh scripts:
set -eu-e: Exit on error-u: Error on access to undefined variable-o pipefail: Abort pipeline early if any part of it fails.There is also
-xthat can be very useful for debugging as it shows a trace of every command and result as it is executed.set -euo pipefailFun fact, if you’re forced to write against POSIX shell, you aren’t allowed to use these options, since they’re not a thing, which is (part of) the reason why for example Google doesn’t allow any shell language but bash, lol.
Btw, all three set options given above are included in POSIX since 2024: https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9799919799/
Ooh, you’re totally right!! I forgot about that since it’s not in the older versions.
I can only remember this because I initially didn’t learn about
xargs— so any time I need to loop over something I tend to usefor var in $(cmd)instead ofcmd | xargs. It’s more verbose but somewhat more flexible IMHO.So I run loops a lot on the command line, not just in shell scripts.
