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I'll preface my question by saying that I'm not a dev. Why do this kind of work in the shell? Isn't it better to do this in a programming language that can run

I'll preface my question by saying that I'm not a dev. Why do this kind of work in the shell? Isn't it better to do this in a programming language that can run on all operating systems? What are Windows users supposed to do?

asicsp 7y ago
Well, there are ways to use such commands on windows too, like WSL, git-bash, cygwin, etc. And, there's powershell on windows (though I haven't used it and not sure about its capabilities) As to why use shell, that depends on your use case and working environment. Shell is something like an IDE [0] where you can solve multiple tasks from single environment. You don't have to use multiple programs (window manager, text editor, IDE, etc). Since it is all text, you can save and repeat a command, share it with others, edit a previously written command, etc. This is quite different from a GUI based workflow. Personally, I find using command line more productive, but as mentioned earlier, it'll depend on the task at hand. [0] https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/ https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/
vlovich123 7y ago
> Why do this kind of work in the shell It can be quicker & easier to write. Also individually these tools can outperform any code you write by hand. Shells are also common on a far wider range of operating systems than typical programming languages like Python et all. Additionally if you want to improve your productivity you may create your own shortcuts (e.g. "build_myproject" which understands what that entails & may involve some amount of text processing among other things). It's typically far more convenient (shorter, simpler & generally easier to understand) to invoke other programs from shell languages since that's what their programming interface is optimized around. Sometimes it's good to even wrap the entrypoint for common scripting languages like Python in shell so that, for example, you can setup a virtual environment to run out of or use the proper version of Python. > Isn't it better to do this in a programming language that can run on all operating systems? Bash & coreutils have been ported to every operating system under the sun (including Sun operating systems). They're even more common & available than any other programming language that doesn't require a compiler (e.g. `adb shell` will get you into an environment where you can grep & do these operations even though there's generally no python or other scripting language available). > What are Windows users supposed to do? * cygwin * WSL * Windows ports of Bash (http://win-bash.sourceforge.net/ http://win-bash.sourceforge.net/, https://gitforwindows.org/ https://gitforwindows.org/, etc) * msys Let me conclude this post that you shouldn't really write anything complex or maintained by multiple people in shell if you can avoid it and if you can make guarantees about (for example) the available of a Python interpreter. That doesn't mean that shell scripts aren't a valuable and important part of the development ecosystem.
overgard 7y ago
As a dev: I don't know. It's a well written article and this stuff can be handy in a pinch, but I've yet to see many real world scenarios where a complicated shell script is a good idea. Most of these examples, I would probably rather write a five line python script to ingest the data into sqlite and then use actual queries.
- nostoc 7y ago
  The use case is to quickly handle ad hoc scenarios. If you need to quickly extract something from a csv, you could break out python, or import it into a database, but using cut and grep (or csv-tools) will take 5 seconds. The point is if you need to do a specific task many times, do it in a programming language. But if you have an ad hoc task, you're saving a lot of time by being proficient in the shell.
  - overgard 7y ago
    Ad hoc tasks quickly become regular tasks though. If your "database" is csv files you're better off figuring out a better way to structure it. The way things are moving with containers, the idea you're even going to have these utilities on the server, and the idea that the server is writing this stuff to a file system- that's totally changing. So is this useful for local stuff? Maybe, but is Excel probably more useful there?
AdmiralAsshat 7y ago
As an also-not-a-dev: Speed. Portability. Muscle memory. I've spent ten years troubleshooting UNIX applications, so most of these commands are fairly well-ingrained into my mode of thinking when I have data that I've got to parse. To boot, these shell utilities were written by people way smarter than me. I have far more confidence that they will handle edge cases in the data stream infinitely better than whatever dinky little Python script I might try to hash out.

asicsp 7y ago

Well, there are ways to use such commands on windows too, like WSL, git-bash, cygwin, etc. And, there's powershell on windows (though I haven't used it and not sure about its capabilities) As to why use shell, that depends on your use case and working environment. Shell is something like an IDE [0] where you can solve multiple tasks from single environment. You don't have to use multiple programs (window manager, text editor, IDE, etc). Since it is all text, you can save and repeat a command, share it with others, edit a previously written command, etc. This is quite different from a GUI based workflow. Personally, I find using command line more productive, but as mentioned earlier, it'll depend on the task at hand. [0] https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/ https://sanctum.geek.nz/arabesque/series/unix-as-ide/

vlovich123 7y ago

> Why do this kind of work in the shell It can be quicker & easier to write. Also individually these tools can outperform any code you write by hand. Shells are also common on a far wider range of operating systems than typical programming languages like Python et all. Additionally if you want to improve your productivity you may create your own shortcuts (e.g. "build_myproject" which understands what that entails & may involve some amount of text processing among other things). It's typically far more convenient (shorter, simpler & generally easier to understand) to invoke other programs from shell languages since that's what their programming interface is optimized around. Sometimes it's good to even wrap the entrypoint for common scripting languages like Python in shell so that, for example, you can setup a virtual environment to run out of or use the proper version of Python. > Isn't it better to do this in a programming language that can run on all operating systems? Bash & coreutils have been ported to every operating system under the sun (including Sun operating systems). They're even more common & available than any other programming language that doesn't require a compiler (e.g. `adb shell` will get you into an environment where you can grep & do these operations even though there's generally no python or other scripting language available). > What are Windows users supposed to do? * cygwin * WSL * Windows ports of Bash (http://win-bash.sourceforge.net/ http://win-bash.sourceforge.net/, https://gitforwindows.org/ https://gitforwindows.org/, etc) * msys Let me conclude this post that you shouldn't really write anything complex or maintained by multiple people in shell if you can avoid it and if you can make guarantees about (for example) the available of a Python interpreter. That doesn't mean that shell scripts aren't a valuable and important part of the development ecosystem.

overgard 7y ago

As a dev: I don't know. It's a well written article and this stuff can be handy in a pinch, but I've yet to see many real world scenarios where a complicated shell script is a good idea. Most of these examples, I would probably rather write a five line python script to ingest the data into sqlite and then use actual queries.

nostoc 7y ago
The use case is to quickly handle ad hoc scenarios. If you need to quickly extract something from a csv, you could break out python, or import it into a database, but using cut and grep (or csv-tools) will take 5 seconds. The point is if you need to do a specific task many times, do it in a programming language. But if you have an ad hoc task, you're saving a lot of time by being proficient in the shell.
- overgard 7y ago
  Ad hoc tasks quickly become regular tasks though. If your "database" is csv files you're better off figuring out a better way to structure it. The way things are moving with containers, the idea you're even going to have these utilities on the server, and the idea that the server is writing this stuff to a file system- that's totally changing. So is this useful for local stuff? Maybe, but is Excel probably more useful there?

AdmiralAsshat 7y ago

As an also-not-a-dev: Speed. Portability. Muscle memory. I've spent ten years troubleshooting UNIX applications, so most of these commands are fairly well-ingrained into my mode of thinking when I have data that I've got to parse. To boot, these shell utilities were written by people way smarter than me. I have far more confidence that they will handle edge cases in the data stream infinitely better than whatever dinky little Python script I might try to hash out.