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Comment by rockyj | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of shell, which language do you think has the best interoperatibility with shell commands. I mean, running a command, parsing the output, looping, adding user interaction etc. with the least amount of friction. Ruby used to come close for me, just put the command in backticks `` and write the main logic in Ruby, but I want to hear if there is something better.

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Powershell, because it actually is a shell so it's great at easily invoking commands and using their outputs as actual return values, and because it has "programming language" constructs like dependency management in modules, etc.

It has some great tools for user interaction, too, including secure string handling for credentials, a TUI framework, easy parallelism, unit tests and lots more.

I did that for 10+ years with perl, but I guess that these days Ruby and Python would be equally valid choices.

To be honest these days I use shell scripts, and if they get too large I'll replace with either golang or python. I don't love python, especially when dependencies are required, but it is portable and has a lot of things built-in that mean executing "standard binaries" isnt required so often.

I like scsh (Scheme shell). A more recent/maintained alternative is Racket's shell-pipeline package https://docs.racket-lang.org/shell-pipeline/pipeline.html

Perl is a great fit. awk, sed, grep, xargs. Expect, occasionally. Python is too fanatically anti-fp and with indentation. JavaScript is too janky.

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