5 ms·

It's more "why not write scripts?" Actually making use of a shell's control structures is code smell until we have far better shells than we currently do. They'

• pxc 5y ago
  If you're gonna be calling a lot of external programs and interacting with files a lot, non-shell scripting languages tend to feel pretty clunky. I know what you mean, though. Most shell languages don't feel like flexible, expressive programming languages in the way that they ought to and could. As you may know, there are some new shells/languages that are trying to bridge the gap in a way that still leaves the shell well-suited to interactive use. The Oil shell wiki has a great list of them (and Oil is one such shell itself, of course): https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/Alternative-Shells
  • remexre 5y ago
    > If you're gonna be calling a lot of external programs and interacting with files a lot, non-shell scripting languages tend to feel pretty clunky. Perl's actually pretty good here; I'm pretty new to it, but it's generally what I reach for when I feel like a bash script has gotten just a bit too complicated.
    • R0b0t1 5y ago
      Perl definitely is the sweet spot. Even then, I think python with multiprocessing and the pipe class is better than bash in some circumstances. If all you're doing is `a | b | c | d` then use bash but if you're pulling stuff out of the middle in a loop, yeah, might want to use a real language.