I really disagree strongly with the take on bash. The best solution is not to add tooling on top of bash or memorize its idiosyncrasies. It is to not use bash. That is the only way to escape its pitfalls.
The two most common alternatives are 1) using some of the newer shells people have created, like Oil shell [0], or 2) using programming language like Python, JavaScript, or PHP.
The problem with using a newer shell is that you'll have to install the new shell anywhere you want to use the script. Meanwhile bash is ubiquitous. Unless you're the only one maintaining the script, you're requiring others to learn the other shell to maintain the script.
The problem with using another programming language is that they rarely have good ergonomics for doing what bash does: stringing together commands, command input, command output, and files. If you try to do that in another programming language, things suddenly get a lot more complicate or at least more verbose.
So I still use bash, but I recognize that it's strength is in running other commands and dealing with I/O. If I'm doing complicated logic that doesn't involve that, then I'll offload my work to another language. Sometimes that just means calling a python script from bash, not avoiding bash completely.
If people found that they work better by taking other approaches, the please share them.
I've done this with awk and jq, but haven't done it with node or python. But why not? It sounds like a good approach for some cases.
tclsh is one way around that. Use a real first-class programming language, but in a mode where calling programs is as easy as it is in shell.
The problem is with bash itself.
We tend to undervalue ease of use and overvalue "cleverness."
Case in point: git. Very clever tool. Ease of use: terrible. But Linus wrote it and Linus is clever, so it must be us that's the problem.
We get what we value. Let's value ease of use more.
Best solution is to just stay away.
For real. Just stop. Don’t try to be macho. The whole model of the language is fundamentally broken. I mean, stringly typed, global mode switches, one-character flags for fundamental comparison operators, defaulting to ignoring errors at every corner you look, functions especially. Each such idiosyncrasy on its own is enough to dismiss such a language, bash has them all plus more.
Actually what language does crash when a function returns false? I mean some throw exceptions but isn't "false" a valid thing to return?
I find the same thing with makefiles - people don't understand what they're doing and expect them to work in a certain way because they haven't ever thought about build systems very deeply. Recursive assignment in Make catches almost everyone out e.g.
FLAGS=-b
COMPILE=compile $(FLAGS)
$(info compile command=$(COMPILE))
FLAGS=-a
myfile:
echo $(COMPILE) $? -o $@
outputs:
t43562@rhodes:~ make -f t.mk
compile command=compile -b
echo compile -a -o myfile
compile -a -o myfile
Despite this, making all assignments immediate to match other programming languages would take a VERY useful tool away. The more you understand these tools the more you know where to bother using them and how much effort to put into it.
Bash scripts are extremely useful and productive for their niche. You'd have to change a whole lot of things to match that.
not to say we can't and shouldn't try to do better.
That's not a very practical hill to die on. But well, you get to decide what fight you engage on.
Many bad designs are too entrenched to be fixed with some tooling