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Comment by ericyd | Hacker News Reader

Not sure I see the benefit of the bun shell. I use shell scripts when I know that the other people using the script will be able to run it in a similar shell to me, in order to cut down on dependencies. If I need it to be cross platform I just use a scripting language like JS.

Bun shell keeps the more esoteric syntax of Unix-like shells but also requires a dependency (Bun itself). If you already have Bun installed why wouldn't you just write a JS script?

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I mandate WSL when working with windows developers, and GNU coreutils for mac developers so that I can assume some things about their dev environments. This solves that problem for shell scripts, there are still other ways where it's useful but a scripting environment is probably the biggest one.

The velocity of writing filesystem and file manipulation files in shell is many times greater than in javascript. Bun shell lets you leverage the power of shell for that stuff while being able to leverage your javascript code at the same time, with fairly minor downsides in exchange.

> The velocity of writing filesystem and file manipulation files in shell is many times greater than in javascript.

I think you're right, after achieving a level of expertise. I've never gotten there myself which probably explains my bias, but I appreciate hearing your perspective.

I can definitely see the value of not wanting to write the boilerplate kind of stuff you need to do for more shell like scripting. I can also see wanting to emulate the traditional syntax while abstracting away whether you are on a Unix system and still allowing traditional JavaScript syntax in between the sheep-y parts.

On the dependency side it'd be slick if you could bun --compile these like normal bun apps.

It's realy nice when I need to do shell stuff - much nicer to be able to use js to write a shell script than either go look up shell syntax again or use js with child_process.spawn()

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