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.

  • exuEnglish
    6•8 months ago

    I use Bash for scripts, though my interactive shell is Fish.

    Usually I use #!/usr/bin/env bash as shebang. This has the advantage of searching your PATH for Bash instead of hardcoding it.

    My folders are only differentiated by those in my PATH and those not.

    Most of my scripts can be found here. They are purely desktop use, no syncing to any servers. Most would be useless there.

    For good practice, I’d recommend using set -euo pipefail to make Bash slightly less insane and use shellcheck to check for issues.
    This is personal preference, but you could avoid Bashisms like [[ and stick to POSIX sh. (Use #!/usr/bin/env sh then.)

    With shortened commands the risk is that you might forget how the full command works. How reliant you want to be on those commands being present is up to you. I wouldn’t implement them as scripts though, just simple aliases instead.
    Scripts only make sense if you want to do something slightly more complex over multiple lines for readability.

    • @[email protected]OPEnglish
      3•8 months ago

      #/usr/bin/env bash typo? #!/usr/bin/env bash

      thx for the tips!

      I prefer single files over aliases since I can more easily manage each command.

      • exuEnglish
        3•8 months ago

        You’re right, it’s #!