Common Lisp for shell scripting (2021)

A first gotcha:

> you could just replace it with… #!/usr/bin/sbcl –load /home/youruser/.sbclrc –script

this doesn't work, since a shebang only accepts one argument.

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There are 2 main caveats to the described approach: starting SBCL like this from sources and not from a binary takes a little time. And you don’t have batteries included. Want a HTTP client, a CSV parser? You have to quickload them and this adds up in the startup time.

We can rely on long-running images in the editor and run stuff from there, bypassing the terminal altogether, or build binaries, or try other approaches (Lish shell, a lisp server https://notabug.org/quasus/lserver/)

But that’s why I started CIEL, CL with batteries included. You can get a binary and run scripts that start fast and can do common tasks. It’s also a superset of useful libraries that you can quickload or use with a core image (for a fast startup in your editor).

https://github.com/ciel-lang/CIEL/

http://ciel-lang.org/

It’s in beta, polishing phase.

Shell scripts are mainly written in order to automate subprocess-heavy tasks or to take advantage of the general availability of bash or bourne-compatible shells on most modern Unix based systems.

If you want things like reasonable variable scoping, real functions, loops, libraries for path and string manipulation, or a sane separation between what is and isn't a string, then Python is the obvious choice.

Yes, Python's subprocess module is less convenient than doing a subprocess call in Unix shell, but you can replace grep, sed, awk, find, and similar common subprocess calls in shell scripts with library and built-in functions in Python. The end result tends to be more a readable, maintainable, and testable script.

Python 3 also gets installed by default on nearly all non-minimal Linux distros these days. SBCL gets installed by default nowhere.

https://github.com/babashka/babashka