Programmer Humor

I wish it had a more comprehensive auto correct feature. I maintain a huge bash repository and have tried to use it, and it common makes mistakes. None of us maintainers have time to rewrite the scripts to match standards.

Once you get used to it it is kind of fun.

Shame about do though.

We have someone at work who uses it and he's constantly having tooling issues due to compatibility problems, so.. yeah.

I'm sure it's fine for sticking in the shebang and writing your own one-off personal scripts, but I would never actually main it. Too much ecosystem relies on bash/posix stuff.

So the alternative is:

• either an obtuse script that works everywhere, or
• a legible script that only works on your machine…

Nu is great. Using it since many years. Clearly superior shell. Only problem is, that it constantly faces breaking changes and you therefore need to frequently update your modules.

It all makes sense when you think about the way it will be parsed. I prefer to use newlines instead of semicolons to show the blocks more clearly.

for file in *.txt
do
    cat "$file"
done

The do and done serve as the loop block delimiters. Such as { and } in many other languages. The shell parser couldn't know where stuff starts/ends.

Edit: I agree that the then/fi, do/done case/esac are very inconsistent.

Also to fail early and raise errors on uninitialized variables, I recommend to add this to the beginning of your bash scripts:

set -euo pipefail

Or only this for regular sh scripts:

set -eu

-e: Exit on error

-u: Error on access to undefined variable

-o pipefail: Abort pipeline early if any part of it fails.

There is also -x that can be very useful for debugging as it shows a trace of every command and result as it is executed.

Back when I did a lot of Perl, those were okay-ish to parse. Nowadays, not so much. I guess it's like Bash. If you write a lot of it (maybe some people do), it's probably simple. If it's only once every six months or less, eeehhh...
It all boils down to familiarity, which comes from repetitiveness.

The copy paste language. AI writes better regex than I do

Bash scripts survive because often times they are the easiest option on an abandoned server