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Comment by wpm | Hacker News Reader

I’ll switch to fish when it comes preinstalled on all of the computers I use so I can write scripts in it.

I already avoid bash scripting so I lose very little. Shell scripting beyond throwaway one-liners is a problem not a solution.

(Well that and all my machines come from the same NixOS configs.)

Ha that’s funny, considering nixos is 99% stdenv which is one of the worst bash monstrosities in existence, and drives people ever further into the swamp of bash. (Ever tried to debug stdenv setup hooks? I still have water damage from the tears.)

I have personally embraced the insanity but let’s not kid ourselves about nixos basically just being three bashes in a trench coat.

Basically https://xkcd.com/224/ , but s/lisp/nix/ s/perl/bash/

It's my daily driver, but I am holding my nose.

Some year something better will show up from someone with more taste (and I know I am not alone in having thoughts on what it would look like), but for now the yak has already been shaven. At least the builds are sandboxed.

Guix if you can stomach it.

Do you really limit your shell experience to plain POSIX? That sounds masochistic.

Ever since shellcheck came around I have been writing all my scripts in POSIX sh. Its not that bad actually and knowing stuff is just more compatible is worth that little friction.

Shellcheck has been a huge game changer for me. The lack of a linter is the main reason I don't consider switching to zsh anymore.

When I first found shellcheck, I'd sit on the train every morning and fix all the stupid little bugs in all our shell code. I learned a TON about shell scripting, because the shellcheck wiki is amazing. We had some redhat 6 init scripts checked into our repos, and shellcheck helpd me find syntax errors in those init scripts. If Redhat can't reliably write shell scripts without a linter, or catch bugs from upstream, what makes us think we're any better?

I wouldn't write serious programs in another language without a linter. Why should I write shell scripts without one?

You shouldn't be writing serious programs in Bash/Zsh at all, is the issue. If it's complex enough to need linting, it's complex enough to require Python/Perl.

Writing all your scripts that way is one thing. I’m not that far off, although I write all my shell functions and things like that in fish. But avoiding using tools that may not be universally available means never using ripgrep or fd or fish or newer versions of bash or any of the other nice updates we have now, and that sounds awful.

I would rather limit myself to things I know are going to be preinstalled on the platforms I use than deal with the masochism that is scripted dependency management. No thanks.

All these comments here "Uhhh just use PythoN!" Yeah? I write scripts that need to run on macOS. No Python there. Yeah I can have my script sit there and pull the command line tools in an automated way and wait the 20 minutes it takes to install or I can pull on my big boy pants and just figure out how to do it in shell. It's turing complete. It works. Whatever.

MacOS doesn’t have python? What?

macOS has not shipped with Python installed in 6 years. If you take a Mac out of the box, open terminal, and run `python` it prompts you in the GUI to install the Command Line Developer Tools.

Thanks GPLv3

there's Perl though :)

That's why I use C to write all my shell scripts. Can't have something non-portable like bash, which is missing from 75% of computers by default.

(Seriously, what am I missing here? Is `apt-brew pacman install fish` really that hard to type? If cross-platform portability is actually a concern, shouldn't you be using Python anyway?)

I don't really care about portability as I do "how much shit do I need to install to actually get work done on my workstations and servers"

Maybe it's because I was a sysadmin in a former life, but overmanaging is almost always a mistake. If I had one single computer and only one, sure, who cares. But I have a homelab full of servers and a constant churn of VMs and I don't need to add in another step of "oh shit X isn't installed yet". Maybe it's also because of that that I don't really give a shit about how "bad" sh/bash/zsh are.

Yes, I can sync dotfiles and crap to git (which I also have to install to use), but it's just a small weight off my shoulders to not have to worry or think about that shit before I can use a server or workstation. I don't want to have to unlearn normal shell to learn fish and then have to switch back when I'm trying to get some thing online so that I can install fish. I'm just not fuckin interested.

(inb4 someone is like nix solves this, i don't give a shit about nix either)

i'll just stick to bash

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