Comment by Wandfarbe | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Wandfarbe | Hacker News Reader

I'm struggling today as well with this shit:

I just wanna write a few small lines of a shell script which downloads stuff;

It is very very stupid through what loops you hvae to jump to do this with curl and bash script in a good way including readability and error handling.

Is a perl script really better?

Perl 5,6 and 7 did not make it very sane to me, managing and installing and working with perl is also less trivial then having a shell like bash, sh or dash available to you.

Something inbetween bash and go is missing, i like the approach of crush. I think thats the biggest misstake happening in bash: playing around with strings and auto expansion and substition etc. Its weird, its error prone, it doesn't have a proper clean well defined ecosysem.

If you're open to learning it, Tcl is actually a good middle ground here. The best way I can describe it is "structured shell script" - still very string oriented, but the syntax and command set is much more well thought out, and its better for building libraries in (having namespacing, among other things). You even have a choice among object systems if you need one.

You don't lose much in terms of shell interop though - the native exec command understands a lot of the basics (file redirection, pipelining, background execution). In the simplest case, it's just one more word:

  exec wget $URL

You do have simple exceptions too, which terminate by default unless you catch them (unfortunately, the stack traces aren't really useful). AFAIK exec throws on a non-zero exit, and you can use it in your own code too:

  # Dead
  error "IO error"

  # Not dead
  if {catch [error "IO error"] error_or_result} {
    # The error
    puts "Caught: $error_or_result"
  } else {
    # The result
    puts "OK: $error_or_result"
  }

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