What do you advice for shell usage?

  • Do you use bash? If not, which one do you use? zsh, fish? Why do you do it?
  • Do you write #!/bin/bash or #!/bin/sh? Do you write fish exclusive scripts?
  • Do you have two folders, one for proven commands and one for experimental?
  • Do you publish/ share those commands?
  • Do you sync the folder between your server and your workstation?
  • What should’ve people told you what to do/ use?
  • good practice?
  • general advice?
  • is it bad practice to create a handful of commands like podup and poddown that replace podman compose up -d and podman compose down or podlog as podman logs -f --tail 20 $1 or podenter for podman exec -it "$1" /bin/sh?

Background

I started bookmarking every somewhat useful website. Whenever I search for something for a second time, it’ll popup as the first search result. I often search for the same linux commands as well. When I moved to atomic Fedora, I had to search for rpm-ostree (POV: it was a horrible command for me, as a new user, to remember) or sudo ostree admin pin 0. Usually, I bookmark the website and can get back to it. One day, I started putting everything into a .bashrc file. Sooner rather than later I discovered that I could simply add ~/bin to my $PATH variable and put many useful scripts or commands into it.

For the most part I simply used bash. I knew that you could somehow extend it but I never did. Recently, I switched to fish because it has tab completion. It is awesome and I should’ve had completion years ago. This is a game changer for me.

I hated that bash would write the whole path and I was annoyed by it. I added PS1="$ " to my ~/.bashrc file. When I need to know the path, I simply type pwd. Recently, I found starship which has themes and adds another line just for the path. It colorizes the output and highlights whenever I’m in a toolbox/distrobox. It is awesome.

  • @[email protected]
    27•9 months ago
    #!/usr/bin/env bash

    A folder dotfiles as git repository and a dotfiles/install that soft links all configurations into their places.

    Two files, ~/.zshrc (without secrets, could be shared) and another for secrets (sourced by .zshrc if exist secrets).

        • @[email protected]
          20•9 months ago

          because bash isn’t always in /usr/bin/bash.

          On macOS the version on /usr/bin/bash is very old (bash 3 I think?), so many users install a newer version with homebrew which ends up in PATH, which /usr/bin/env looks at.

          Protip: I start every bash script with the following two lines:

          #!/usr/bin/env bash
set -euo pipefail

          set -e makes the script exit if any command (that’s not part of things like if-statements) exits with a non-zero exit code

          set -u makes the script exit when it tries to use undefined variables

          set -o pipefail will make the exit code of the pipeline have the rightmost non-zero exit status of the pipeline, instead of always the rightmost command.

        • calm.like.a.bombEnglish
          8•9 months ago

          #!/usr/bin/env will look in PATH for bash, and bash is not always in /bin, particularly on non-Linux systems. For example, on OpenBSD it’s in /usr/local/bin, as it’s an optional package.

          If you are sure bash is in /bin and this won’t change, there’s no harm in putting it directly in your shebang.

    • @[email protected]
      1•9 months ago

      Instead of a install skript, check out GNU stow. It does exactly that and you can interqctively choose which things to install/symlink.