Hacker News Reader

> 0-dependencies

Actually, quite the opposite. All that shell scripts do is glue together other programs they depend on.

That makes them not portable. You can't just move a bash script from Linux to macOS because it uses ancient pre-GPLv3 versions of bash and all the other GNU utils.

View on HN

Just use POSIX-compatible sh instead of bash. It's also not hard to use mostly POSIX-compatible commands (grep, sed, cat, cp, mkdir ...).

For scripts where you need something unstandardized, say, imagemagick, you would wind up with up with a dependency in most other languages as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com