Surprising Bash Variables

>I've written literally thousands of lines of shell scripts (maybe even 10k+) across dozens of scripts over the years and I've only really looked at the docs a couple of times. Of course I'm Googling various syntax things that are humanly impossible to remember, but I never once really sat there and combed through all of the docs or even read a book on Bash.

Only really looking at the docs a couple times isn't something to brag about, and doing that doesn't make bash good.

Nor is it good for languages to be designed so you don't have to read the manual (or else you get COBOL or HyperTalk, and then you still have to read the manual).

Nor is it good for languages to have syntax things that are humanly impossible to remember.

All those claims you deleted actually support my point about bash being terribly inferior to Python (whose syntax is extremely simple and easy to learn and remember and most importantly read, and it even has built-in interactive "help" documentation), which is why I quoted what you originally said in the first place.

Again, what is it about that script you offered as an example that is easier, more elegant, or more maintainable and understandable to do in bash than in Python?

If you don't have an answer to that, can you show me any other bash code that was better off written in bash than in Python? And explain how it's better, please.

Nobody's running such an old version of Ultrix on their MicroVAX with a big yellow thick wire Ethernet cable and vampire tap and static /etc/hosts file derived from HOSTS.TXT downloaded weekly from SRI-NIC.ARPA without checking certificates for man-in-the-middle attacks and running unencrypted rlogin and telnet demons instead of ssh any more, that they can't easily and securely update Python and install modules.

Also: You think the Python "ecosystem" is goddamned? Remember that bash by its very nature depends on a terribly goddamned inconsistent "ecosystem" consisting of all the essential utilities it requires to do the most elementary of tasks, including awk, sed, dc, cut, grep, yes, and many others, whose locations and apis and features and parameters and behavior and performance vary widely from platform to platform. Bash is much more tightly coupled with the operating system distribution that Python.

While most of those essential features (like cough cough string manipulation and arithmetic rolls eyes, among others) are built into Python or available as standard plug-in modules (like os, system, threading, multiprocessing, pexpect, mmap, readline, Beautiful Soup, SQL Alchemy, json, yaml, etc) that are identical across all platforms.

And most of those Python modules are vastly more efficient than their bash counterparts, because they don't require forking separate processes instead of making local procedure calls, communicating over 1-dimensional pipes instead of shared memory, serializing and deserializing text parameters and data instead of passing pointers to live data structures.

What good is a scripting language these days that doesn't have built-in json and yaml parsers (not to mention a nice way to parse html and talk to databases)? I see so many half-assed bash scripts desperately trying to parse field separated values and process output with regular expressions, grep, cut, awk and sed, by forking off hundreds of ridiculously inefficient processes.

Yes I know there are xpath/jsonpath utilities you can execute from bash scripts that look up elements and keys in XML documents and json dictionaries -- that's my whole point, that there NEEDS to be something like that! God forbid you need to process 150 million records.

And as to what the grandparent poster actually said: I explained in the cousin posting below that I quoted and addressed what he ORIGINALLY said, and then he NINJA-EDITED it after I replied, to substantially change the meaning and remove several ridiculous, indefensible statements.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19898052

Unless he's just gaslighting and actually MEANT for you and others to mistakenly believe that I was putting words in his mouth (in which case we should expect his radio silence to continue), I'm still waiting for him to acknowledge that fact, and finally reply to the simple straightforward question that he kept avoiding:

Name one thing about that script that's easier to do in bash than in Python.

But I'm not holding my breath. Do you care to chime in with an answer instead?

>People who aren't stupid and know other languages still whip out little shell scripts; we should try to understand why that is.

Well the grandparent's excuse (which he deleted) for whipping out little shell scripts was that he "only really looked at the docs a couple of times". I don't think that's a legitimate excuse, myself, and apparently neither did he, so he ninja-edited it out, instead of admitting it wasn't a good defense of bash to brag about only reading the manual twice.