3 ms·

Can you give some examples? I've personally found bash to be among the most difficult to work with. If I need to do something in bash I'd rather keep it as a li

Can you give some examples? I've personally found bash to be among the most difficult to work with. If I need to do something in bash I'd rather keep it as a lightweight wrapper around a ruby script or something, though I know that isn't always an option

fabiomaia 5y ago
If you are manipulating files and processes, bash is a very natural and succint language to do so. Programs are much more elegant than a generic programming language.
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bradwood 5y ago
Bash is about pipelines which is a rather functional concept. If you can exploit these you can write succinct, readable and effective bash IMHO. If you're just stringing together a lot of conditionals it gets ugly fast.
- pizza234 5y ago
  There isn't such a thing as readable bash, as a significant amount of its syntax is symbolic (and cryptic, by the way), and it's full of warts and unintuitive quirks. Writing very simple scripts is certainly simple, but anything even a bit functionally more advanced (arrays, but even strings cycling or splitting is quirky) is a pain. Heck, even something as simple as process substitution is horribly unsafe (I wonder how many devs know how/why). It's practically impossible to write correct Bash without shellcheck.
  - nomel 5y ago
    I disagree that bash needs to be cryptic, but I've also written perl code, so maybe any resemblance of a sane perspective was beaten out of me. > It's practically impossible to write correct Bash without shellcheck. I agree with this, since I've never seen a bash script, in the wild, that passed the important bits of shellcheck, without already being passed through spellcheck. I challenge anyone that thinks they've written good bash, with any significant level of complexity, to run that script through shellcheck. Each time I've done this, when starting at a new company, the response has usually been "Will not fix. That's why you don't use spaces in filenames/paths".
    - pizza234 5y ago
      > I disagree that bash needs to be cryptic But it's not a developer's choice - Bash's syntax is cryptic itself. Here's a random sampling of common patterns: Arrays: - `${#myvar[@]}`: unreadable - `mapfile myvar < <(grep pattern file)`: "mapfile" is not exactly a clear term (there's the synonym "readarray", but "mapfile" is the reference; worse, you may find both used inconsistently); the command as I wrote it also has two problems Strings: - `${myvar##.*}`: unreadable - `echo $(IFS=,; echo "${myvar[*]}")`: unreadable; most also don't know the difference between `[@]` and `[\*]`; this doesn't also work for two-char join operations - `[[ $myvar =~ $(echo '\bpattern\b') ]]`: unreadable, and most don't know why command substitution is needed Redirections: - `3>&2 2>&1 1>&3`: most don't know what this means One can certainly get an idea of what's going on; but one gets an idea of what's going on also when reading assembly with labels.
r3trohack3r 5y ago
For a pretty good example of a readable/fun program written in bash, the KISS package manager stands out: https://github.com/kisslinux/kiss/blob/master/kiss https://github.com/kisslinux/kiss/blob/master/kiss Neofetch is also written in bash: https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch/blob/master/neofetch https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch/blob/master/neofetch For my own work, I once wrote a functional file system based irc client in ~50 lines of bash: https://github.com/retrohacker/irc-sh/blob/master/main.sh https://github.com/retrohacker/irc-sh/blob/master/main.sh To learn bash: * https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ * https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible
nomel 5y ago
I found that nobody actually works in "pure bash". There's always sed, awk, perl, something to do fractional math, etc.

fabiomaia 5y ago

If you are manipulating files and processes, bash is a very natural and succint language to do so. Programs are much more elegant than a generic programming language.

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bradwood 5y ago

Bash is about pipelines which is a rather functional concept. If you can exploit these you can write succinct, readable and effective bash IMHO. If you're just stringing together a lot of conditionals it gets ugly fast.

pizza234 5y ago
There isn't such a thing as readable bash, as a significant amount of its syntax is symbolic (and cryptic, by the way), and it's full of warts and unintuitive quirks. Writing very simple scripts is certainly simple, but anything even a bit functionally more advanced (arrays, but even strings cycling or splitting is quirky) is a pain. Heck, even something as simple as process substitution is horribly unsafe (I wonder how many devs know how/why). It's practically impossible to write correct Bash without shellcheck.
- nomel 5y ago
  I disagree that bash needs to be cryptic, but I've also written perl code, so maybe any resemblance of a sane perspective was beaten out of me. > It's practically impossible to write correct Bash without shellcheck. I agree with this, since I've never seen a bash script, in the wild, that passed the important bits of shellcheck, without already being passed through spellcheck. I challenge anyone that thinks they've written good bash, with any significant level of complexity, to run that script through shellcheck. Each time I've done this, when starting at a new company, the response has usually been "Will not fix. That's why you don't use spaces in filenames/paths".
  - pizza234 5y ago
    > I disagree that bash needs to be cryptic But it's not a developer's choice - Bash's syntax is cryptic itself. Here's a random sampling of common patterns: Arrays: - `${#myvar[@]}`: unreadable - `mapfile myvar < <(grep pattern file)`: "mapfile" is not exactly a clear term (there's the synonym "readarray", but "mapfile" is the reference; worse, you may find both used inconsistently); the command as I wrote it also has two problems Strings: - `${myvar##.*}`: unreadable - `echo $(IFS=,; echo "${myvar[*]}")`: unreadable; most also don't know the difference between `[@]` and `[\*]`; this doesn't also work for two-char join operations - `[[ $myvar =~ $(echo '\bpattern\b') ]]`: unreadable, and most don't know why command substitution is needed Redirections: - `3>&2 2>&1 1>&3`: most don't know what this means One can certainly get an idea of what's going on; but one gets an idea of what's going on also when reading assembly with labels.

r3trohack3r 5y ago

For a pretty good example of a readable/fun program written in bash, the KISS package manager stands out: https://github.com/kisslinux/kiss/blob/master/kiss https://github.com/kisslinux/kiss/blob/master/kiss Neofetch is also written in bash: https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch/blob/master/neofetch https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch/blob/master/neofetch For my own work, I once wrote a functional file system based irc client in ~50 lines of bash: https://github.com/retrohacker/irc-sh/blob/master/main.sh https://github.com/retrohacker/irc-sh/blob/master/main.sh To learn bash: * https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/ * https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible

nomel 5y ago

I found that nobody actually works in "pure bash". There's always sed, awk, perl, something to do fractional math, etc.