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]English
    3•8 months ago

    Great list! I would add “always surround variables with quotes in case the value contains spaces”.

    • @[email protected]
      2•8 months ago

      Good point, forgot one of the basics.

      Also, to make your scripts more readable and less error prone use something like

      if [[ $# -gt 0 ]] && [[ "$1" == "--dry-run" ]]; then
  dry_run=1
  shift
else
  dry_run=0
fi

if [[ $# != 3 ]]; then
  echo "Usage: $0 [ --dry-run ] <description of foo> <description of bar> <description of baz>" >&2
  exit 1
fi

foo="$1"
shift
bar="$1"
shift
baz="$1"
shift

      at the start of your script to name your parameters and provide usage information if the parameters did not match what you expected. The shift and use of $1 at the bottom allows for easy addition and removal of parameters anywhere without renumbering the variables.

      Obviously this is only for the 90% of scripts that do not have overly complex parameter needs. For those you probably want to use something like getopt or another language with libraries like the excellent clap crate in Rust.