This may make some people pull their hair out, but I’d love to hear some arguments. I’ve had the impression that people really don’t like bash, not from here, but just from people I’ve worked with.

There was a task at work where we wanted something that’ll run on a regular basis, and doesn’t do anything complex aside from reading from the database and sending the output to some web API. Pretty common these days.

I can’t think of a simpler scripting language to use than bash. Here are my reasons:

  • Reading from the environment is easy, and so is falling back to some value; just do ${VAR:-fallback}; no need to write another if-statement to check for nullity. Wanna check if a variable’s set to something expected? if [[ <test goes here> ]]; then <handle>; fi
  • Reading from arguments is also straightforward; instead of a import os; os.args[1] in Python, you just do $1.
  • Sending a file via HTTP as part of an application/x-www-form-urlencoded request is super easy with curl. In most programming languages, you’d have to manually open the file, read them into bytes, before putting it into your request for the http library that you need to import. curl already does all that.
  • Need to read from a curl response and it’s JSON? Reach for jq.
  • Instead of having to set up a connection object/instance to your database, give sqlite, psql, duckdb or whichever cli db client a connection string with your query and be on your way.
  • Shipping is… fairly easy? Especially if docker is common in your infrastructure. Pull Ubuntu or debian or alpine, install your dependencies through the package manager, and you’re good to go. If you stay within Linux and don’t have to deal with differences in bash and core utilities between different OSes (looking at you macOS), and assuming you tried to not to do anything too crazy and bring in necessary dependencies in the form of calling them, it should be fairly portable.

Sure, there can be security vulnerability concerns, but you’d still have to deal with the same problems with your Pythons your Rubies etc.

For most bash gotchas, shellcheck does a great job at warning you about them, and telling how to address those gotchas.

There are probably a bunch of other considerations but I can’t think of them off the top of my head, but I’ve addressed a bunch before.

So what’s the dealeo? What am I missing that may not actually be addressable?

  • @[email protected]OP
    3•16 hours ago

    To be fair, you don’t always have to use the [[ syntax. I know I don’t, e.g. if I’m just looking for a command that returns 1 or 0, which happens quite a bit if you get to use grep.

    That said, man test is my friend.

    But I’ve also gotten so used to using it that I remember -z and -n by heart :P

    • @calcopiritus
      2•6 hours ago

      If you need to use bash a lot just to learn 2 “keywords”, then it’s not a good language.

      I have looked at bash scripts in the past, and even written some (small amount). I had to look up -z and -n every time. I’ve written a lot more python than bash, that’s for sure. But even if I don’t write python for a year, when needed I can just write an entire python script without minimal doc lookups. I just need to search if the function I want is part of syd, os or path.

      The first time I want to do an else if my IDE will mark it red and I’ll write eliffrom then on, same thing if I try to use { }.

      If a bash script requires at least one array and one if statement, I can write the entire thing in python faster than I can search how to do those 2 things in bash.