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See the same debate ensue each time with bash - use python, they shout. Perhaps the overriding factor here is familiarity? Past looping and some basic flow cont

See the same debate ensue each time with bash - use python, they shout. Perhaps the overriding factor here is familiarity? Past looping and some basic flow control I'm guessing most people run out of being comfortable in bash and can get things done quicker in their fave Lang?

kaba0 6y ago
It’s not about being comfortable, but about the million ways your shell script will fail. A file has a space in the name? Good chance your script failed. No file founs? Same. Multiple files found after expansion? Same.
Too 6y ago
Please read http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls. Now you can find such a page of footguns for almost any language out there. But this on a whole different level and affects even the most fundamental features. One can't even for-loop a list of files or use echo in the first intuitive way without running into a trap that potentially blows up your whole system. It's the complete opposite of "pit of success" Familiarity is of course an important factor, though I would actually claim the problem is the opposite, people reach towards bash - because of familiarity of what they type on the cli. Not realizing that scripting is a complete different world from interactive use where you can inspect, correct and manually adjust every action step by step, with same input each time. A language with only string as a data type (it has arrays and numbers but its so confusing and converts implicitly that you might as well ignore it, IFS anyone?), surprising quoting, data and input interpreted as code, globbing and expansions where you least expect it, global variable everything, no module-system, only error handling is either errexit or manually checking each command and every sub-pipe, functions make error-handling behave even weirder. It can't be made safe no matter how hard you try to familiarize yourself with it.

kaba0 6y ago

It’s not about being comfortable, but about the million ways your shell script will fail. A file has a space in the name? Good chance your script failed. No file founs? Same. Multiple files found after expansion? Same.

Too 6y ago

Please read http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfalls. Now you can find such a page of footguns for almost any language out there. But this on a whole different level and affects even the most fundamental features. One can't even for-loop a list of files or use echo in the first intuitive way without running into a trap that potentially blows up your whole system. It's the complete opposite of "pit of success" Familiarity is of course an important factor, though I would actually claim the problem is the opposite, people reach towards bash - because of familiarity of what they type on the cli. Not realizing that scripting is a complete different world from interactive use where you can inspect, correct and manually adjust every action step by step, with same input each time. A language with only string as a data type (it has arrays and numbers but its so confusing and converts implicitly that you might as well ignore it, IFS anyone?), surprising quoting, data and input interpreted as code, globbing and expansions where you least expect it, global variable everything, no module-system, only error handling is either errexit or manually checking each command and every sub-pipe, functions make error-handling behave even weirder. It can't be made safe no matter how hard you try to familiarize yourself with it.