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Comment by 0x3444ac53 | Hacker News Reader

I've tried nushell and other shell replacements and it just feels like I'm learning a new programming language for no good reason

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To be fair the example above is easier to remember than:

  ls -l --sort=size | head -n 5 | tail -n 4 | awk '{print $5 " = " $9}' | numfmt --to iec | jq --raw-input --null-input 'inputs | gsub("\r$"; "") | split(" = "; "") | select(length == 2) | {"s": (.[0]), "n": .[1]}'

This example shows nicely how ugly text processing is: you have to use head and tail simply to trim out the first line of ls (the total).

I think it doesn't even work correctly. ls lists files and directories and then picks the first 4 (it should only select files).

And this also uses awk and jq, which are not just simple "one purpose" tools, but pretty much complete programming languages. jq is not even part of most standard installations, it has to be installed first.

Yes, the point was to show that nushell is pretty awesome. I totally punted on the file only part.

I'm aware ;)

I'd replace the first part with (which isn't any shorter, but in general if I want a list of files for a pipeline, find is usually more flexible than ls for anything but the most trivial):

    find -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf '%s %f\n' | sort -n | head -n 5

For the latter part, I'd tend to think that if you're going to use awk and jq, you might as well use Ruby.

   ruby -rjson -nae ' puts(JSON.pretty_generate({n: $F[1], s: "%.5f MB" % ($F[0].to_i / 10e6) }))'

("-nae" effectively takes an expression on the command line (-e), wraps it in "while gets; ... end" (-a), and adds the equivalent to "$F = $_.split" before the first line of your expression (-n))

It's still ugly, so no competition for nushell still.

I'd be inclined to drop a little wrapper in my bin with a few lines of helpers (see my other comment) and do all Ruy if I wanted to get closer without having to change shells...

Ruby is a pretty natural fit for shell scripting.

https://lucasoshiro.github.io/posts-en/2024-06-17-ruby-shell...

It's close, but there are some things that could be better to make it easier to access e.g. file size and type. I think maybe a 50-100 line set of helpers and a one line wrapper (to spawn Ruby with -r<helper> -e <command line>) would get you mostly to where nushell is.

> And this also uses awk and jq, which are not just simple "one purpose" tools, but pretty much complete programming languages

In a way that exactly illustrates the GGP's point: why learn a new language (nushell's) when you can learn awk or jq, which are arguably more generally- and widely-applicable than nushell. Or if awk and jq are too esoteric, you could even pipe the output of `find` into the python or ruby interpreters (one of which you may already know, and are much more generally applicable than nushell, awk, or jq), with a short in-line script on the command line.

> awk or jq, which are arguably more generally- and widely-applicable than nushell

That is backwards. I know I said "complete programming languages", but to be fair, awk only shines when it comes to "records processing", jq only shines for JSON processing. nushell is more like a general scripting language — much more flexible.

Yeah... https://www.sophiajt.com/case-for-nushell/ makes a really good case for Nushell as an alternative to Bash.

Unfortunately, I don't think Nushell brings much benefit for folks who already know Bash enough to change directories and launch executables and who already know Python enough to use more complicated data structures/control flow/IDE features

I'm still rooting for Nushell as I think its a really cool idea.

For me the blocker was having to switch to bash/powershell when moving to a different machine (ie: servers, work machine, etc..). I would end up needing to redo same things to be compatible with the existing tools; eventually I just gave up and got used to readily available shells instead.

Ok if it's not for you. But there is of course a very good reason — work with objects in the pipeline instead of "dumb text". Also PowerShell and nushell are quite nice to learn, whereas Bash is absolutely horrible.

I wonder if this is a case of "worse is better", or just the long-term entrenchment of text. Because nushell hasn't been adopted all that much compared to bash or even zsh (or a "real" scripting language like python or ruby). I don't know much about PowerShell adoption (haven't used Windows in over 20 years), but I'd assume since it's a first-party system that's default installed(?), it's done better adoption-wise.

I agree that bash sucks, but I really have no motivation to learn something like nushell. I can get by with bash for simpler things, and when I get frustrated with bash, I switch to python, which is default-available everywhere I personally need it to be.

Back to text, though... I'm honestly not sure objects are strictly better than dumb text. Objects means higher cognitive overhead; text is... well, text. You can see it right there in front of you, count lines and characters, see its delimiters and structure, and come up with code to manipulate it. And, again, if I need objects, I have python.

I get the point of "either Bash or straight to a real programming language". That's what I do too, for automation. I like how PowerShell makes one-off tasks easier which would otherwise be the typical pipe of cat, grep, sed, awk etc.

About objects vs. text: I'm convinced that objects are vastly superior. There was a comment about this here with good arguments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45907248

Well, the reason is you can stop using Bash. If you never write Bash scripts already then you probably don't need it (and also congratulations on doing things right), but most people at least have lazy colleagues that write shell scripts. One day I'd like them to be not awful.

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