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You know, I work at the command line all day, and I'm always happy to learn a new trick. But for writing actual scripts, I'd much rather write in Ruby. I don't
by billybob 16y ago
You know, I work at the command line all day, and I'm always happy to learn a new trick. But for writing actual scripts, I'd much rather write in Ruby. I don't want to have to use awkward syntax like case statements ending with "esac."
Yes, using Ruby introduces a dependency beyond Unix. But I already use lots of libraries (Rails, Rspec, etc) and tools (ImageMagick, Ghostscript), so I don't see that as a problem, just part of the job.
- wladimir 16y agoIndeed, I've long ago adopted the convention to do any remotely advanced scripting in a "real" scripting/programming language (myself, I use Python for this). Bash scripting is good for running a few commands in a sequence, but in my experience gets unmaintainable and unreadable very quickly, especially if you try to do sane error handling/logging, or operations on non-text data.
- billybob 16y agoAgreed. Although I should add that it's still great to call out to the standard Unix toolset when it's the easiest way to get something done. The accepted answer here illustrates that: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4714043/what-is-the-best-way-to-sort-30gb-of-strings-with-a-computer-with-4gb-of-ram-usin http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4714043/what-is-the-best-...
- JonnieCache 16y agoA quick... require 'fileutils' include FileUtils ...and you can almost pretend you are writing bash. http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/fileutils/rdoc/index.html http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/fileutils/rdoc/index.html
- krainboltgreene 16y agoFileUtils is a step back as far as I'm concerned. In fact, all the file-stuff is both ill-documented and anti-ruby-readability.