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Comment by vander_elst | Hacker News Reader

The more I use bash the more I appreciate it. It has a lot of sharp edges and quirks, but it's coincise, it works basically on all Unix systems and everyone knows (at least a bit of) it.

A lot of attempts to fill this space have large gaps in this aspects. Not sure how this scores on those dimensions.

For up to ~50 lines of script, bash is the most effective thing I found so far. Tried zsh, fish, python, ruby, but for such glue code bash rules.

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> The more I use bash the more I appreciate it.

That is true for sure if you write bash scripts quasi daily. However if you don't it becomes very easy to forget, at least for me. That's why I'm the type of person that tries to look out for alternatives in different languages.

I've had and read from cover to cover, Bash, sed, and AWK books, yet when I have to get back to them I still only remeber the most fundamental features that I use every couple of days or weeks.

My rule of thumb for moving from bash to Perl/Python etc is when I need to start implementing multiple arrays and associative arrays to get the job done.

Agree

I found that browsing through the bash source makes remembering things about how to use bash easier. It is simple enough to see the gears at work, comapared to say python interpreter sources.

don't those quirks and sharp edges leave security holes in the script tho?

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