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> When I was a young, green, university student, I was forced to use test(1) as the only true way to do testing in shell scripting. […] Yeah, I was also forced
by Wowfunhappy 9mo ago
> When I was a young, green, university student, I was forced to use test(1) as the only true way to do testing in shell scripting. […] Yeah, I was also forced to not use semicolons as they were evil (according to my professor, any comment unneeded!).
The author’s professor clearly went overboard, but doesn’t this entire anecdote demonstrate the value of teaching it this way? Having green students call the `test` binary provides more insight into how UNIX operates, and gets them using a UNIX mindset. They can discover the syntactic shortcuts later.
- ogogmad 9mo agoHmm. What if we replaced the whole of bash with the contents of /bin?
- Wowfunhappy 9mo ago…you always need some sort of shell to call the binaries, don’t you? I do think it makes sense to have beginners use `sh` instead of `bash`.
- jcynix 9mo agoOh, "once upon a time" I did set emacs to be my login "shell" and emacs can call other binaries via execve, handle sub processes, etc. Worked as expected. Getting a Linux or Unix system to boot without a proper shell would be another complication, so a system completely without a she'll? I expect that to either be easy nor useful.