Comment by jaymzcampbell | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaymzcampbell | Hacker News Reader

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As soon as I start adding ifs and battling to remember the exact syntax I give up and move to Python and argparse. Recently I've started using the Begins[1] library to make useful command line tools and scripts even more quickly. I appreciate it's less and less portable at this stage but so much more productive. Most of the time these scripts are very specific anyway so it's not a concern.

The other thing I've noticed amongst peers is that I'm usually the only one (or one of a limited few) that remotely understand the shell script too. So I'd serve the team better writing it with Python. YMMV with that of course.

[1] http://begins.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

There is a lot of historical arcana baked into the command line and bash, but I've found it worth learning like any other language.

Anyway, just for future reference you can use bash's `help` command to get documentation about builtins. In the case of conditionals, we want to loo at `test`:

    $ help test

I find this a lot easier than wading through the bash man page.

Holy crap, xelxebar. Thank you! This is a game-changer. I've been wading through the bash man pages like a fool.

Thanks for pointing to Begins!

I suspect some of this is just a difference in background or culture; shell conditionals look completely obvious and intuitive to me, and I'm pretty sure my team can handle shell better than python.

Begins looks awesome, thanks for sharing! :)

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