• Billegh
    3•6 months ago

    Shell scripts were a mistake.

    I understand 1000% but I’m not sure I agree. With the peevishness of C and latent autism of assembly, something compiled or otherwise binary isn’t always simple and straightforward. Sometimes, you have a task that only needs to be done three times, and just replaying the commands is sufficient.

    sh, ash, and bash are all kinda dumb. Absolutely. But there are other shells that are significantly better. csh and zsh are both great. ksh has some history on it but is good too. But “shell scripts” don’t have to be in your shell language. The hashbang line will let you make a command file and so long as you can describe the command line you can get most shells to run it. Be that language line noise perl or python or even go.

    • @[email protected]
      2•6 months ago

      As a long time former ZSH user, I’ll definitely include ZSH in shell languages to avoid for scripting.

      The problem is simply the number of rules and incantations to slavishly include everywhere to make your script bail on error. set -e is not enough by far.

      Python with plumbum or nushell are definitely better.