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Comment by sam_bristow | Hacker News Reader

I would love having structured output from shell commands, but for now I'd settle for people using stdout and stderr correctly.

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I see people say they would like this quite often. There is a command line interface that does do this, powershell is very structured in this exact way. But no one is throwing away their sh/bash/tcsh/ksh for powershell. I think this is just a classic example of the grass being more green on the other side.

I'd take powershell with proper system integration over bash any day.

The "with proper system integration" is the kicker. Powershell does run on linux[0], there is nothing stopping you or anyone else in creating this "proper integration", but it has yet to be done. I find this telling in what the real value proposition of this kind of shell is in the first place.

I do sympathize with you over bash, I have seen people wield it in quite horrific ways. In general I find that people are under utilizing their functions. For one example, functions in most shell languages have stdin, stdout, and stderr just like programs you call but I often see people miss this and thus miss the ability to compose said functions.

I switched over to using the plan9 rc[1] for my scripts years ago and never looked back.

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/scripting/insta... [1] http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc

Yea, I guess I could create that integration, but the key would be getting it included as the default on Linux installs. I like to use what is generally available, so that I'm not completely lost when I remote into an unfamiliar server.

> I'd settle for people using stdout and stderr correctly.

I use this as a litmus test when looking at an unfamiliar codebase: if the author couldn't care less about writing diagnostics to stderr instead of stdout, there is little chance they cared to get more tricky stuff right.

Another test that goes hand in hand with this one is to check if error messages use a consistent style such as all start with a capital or small letter and all end or don't end with a period. Extra bonus points for using consistent quoting style.

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