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Thanks for sharing this link. As soon as you start needing to read POSIX.* docs, you suddenly realize you need answers to a lot of basic questions. Sufficientl

Thanks for sharing this link. As soon as you start needing to read POSIX.* docs, you suddenly realize you need answers to a lot of basic questions. Sufficiently advanced shell scripts should be moved to a programming language, but until you hit that threshold, whatever one defines as appropriate, you still need some of these answered.

chasil 5y ago
If you need to coordinate activity between multiple systems in such a way that you are calling remote shells, then the shell is the place to run the show. I wrote an article on xargs parallel scripting some years ago that was popular here, and I can't imagine trying to do that in C. POSIX shells have great flaws. It is not LR-parsed language that can be implemented by a simple yacc grammar, and this leads to ambiguity. However, POSIX (as dash) is fast, portable, and small enough for embedded systems. Few of dash's peers are its equal if all of these are required.
- andrewmcwatters 5y ago
  Totally. This is lost on a lot of developers. Even having a rudimentary knowledge of Shell Command Language saves a lot of otherwise wasted time.