Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs
github.com
github.com
It's often not the best choice. There are situations where, I'd argue, it is. One of the main reasons, in my experience, is for very lightweight servers. I don't want python or node or anything. I want to run a web server with 128mb of ram and a 1gb disk. Somewhat niche, but it's useful to just use the base system.
The other useful thing about it is knowing your shell in general. Even if you're not on the infrastructure team, being comfortable knowing how to navigate a system is both fun and sometimes critical. You never know when you'll need it, and it's an interesting look into your tools.
It's akin to saying "why know how to use a saw when you can use a chainsaw" or "why know how to make a fire when you can use lighter fluid and a lighter?" Sometimes things come up. And it's fun to know how we got to where we are today.
It is also limited so you might have to add other things. The README suggests using markdown.pl for markdown support.
Like, yeah, why are you mad? And also, if a dude wants to cut down a tree with a kitchen knife that's actually pretty impressive.
A process or workflow that involves a 3rd party service or application will have to be modified or reconsidered as the 3rd party's functionality changes, is updated, or disappears.
find . -name '*.md' -type f -exec sh -c '
for file do
out="docs/${file#./}"
out="${out%.md}.html"
mkdir -p "$(dirname "$out")"
pandoc --quiet --template template.html "$file" -o "$out"
done I love bash for quick hacks. I abhor it for things like this.
How is this any different of someone including multiple python modules to create the same stack for which probably amount to more lines of code if you were to copy and paste in to a single document.
It's like react, a stack with stupid amount of LoC only for the developer to use 1% of and the rest sits unused and bugs the site.
You can source bash scripts so if it's lines of code, break them in to chunks.
If you remove that from your reply you're on your way to understanding why I don't like an absolute unit of a bash script.
I'd rather a single unruly page of code to do the whole thing rather than multiple modules that do multiple things half-efficiently that require multiple thought to uncover.
It often doesn't work.
> How is this any different of someone including multiple python modules to create the same stack for which probably amount to more lines of code if you were to copy and paste in to a single document.
There's no problem with 1200 lines of code. The problem is 1200 lines of Bash. The difference is that Bash is incredibly awkward and error prone compared to almost every other language out there.
I suppose my main bash script on BSD, ~400 lines for backup, compilation and other admin tasks including a portable static text/plain web server have never failed me but never tested them interchangeably, so, prone some truth to failure.
I am not disagreeing of course and I would agree, Bash is designed for the system functions and that this is niche. However if it's all you got, eh, go for it.
Systems admin for 15 years and have handled some very hosed systems. Maybe the python binary got hosed and you were really desperate to share your lasagna recipe with your mother and the internet, it does have a purpose. Not ideal, sure.
Mercifully, it isn't all we've got!
Write your thing in whatever you want, AI it into another language, done.
I'm truly mystified as to why we're doing this. True, shell programming has footguns, but they're not egregiously numerous compared to the typical suggestioned replacements.
Funnily enough, when the issues with these other languages are brought up—like arbitrary code execution on module import—instead of shallow comments, we often cue an informative and interesting discussion.
Why do we HNers treat the shell language so differently?
One of my working hypotheses is that it's due to shell being both ubiquitous and unfamiliar. Everyone uses it but earnest study is rare. That perhaps make it an easy stress sink for our various sublimated frustrations.
I'm an unabashed (heh) fan of shell programming. It really is a beautiful little language once you learn how to think in terms of data streams, dynamic scope, and DSL design.
I used a similar system back in the day, nanoblogger:
I still have fond memories of the open source community’s warm welcome and amazing contributions to the project.
Engine: https://github.com/alganet/alganet.github.io/blob/master/bui...
Result: https://alganet.github.io/
Does RSS, updates old pages when index.html changes, dual-language.
My local test server is also shell: https://github.com/alganet/alganet.github.io/blob/master/ser... (good old https://gist.github.com/alganet/140c7c12d1603c244a01 from 2015)
There's absolutely 0 advantage, especially when AI can write simple code like that easily, over using any other language. It makes reading and maintaining much more complex.
Hell, even GitHub's syntax highlighting (and VS Code's) breaks in many places throughout the script. It's just a terrible developer experience, even for your own scripts that nobody else will ever touch.
Some people will say that the advantage is that you don't need to install another runtime, but even this is wrong as the script uses bash, not sh.
I hate Python with a passion, but I'd gladly take it over bash for any of those scripts.
shellcheck is a huge help in the middle sized shell script space and will regularly shout at me about missing all the random gotchas like not quoting file paths.
From a pragmatic perspective I agree. But I think you’re missing the point here. A lot of the most entertaining, and dare I say inspiring content, found on Hacker News is about exactly things like this. Things that seem silly, but are also very intentionally pushing the boundaries to the extreme/absurd.
PS: I don't know why HN allows downvoting seeing how it is always so abused. Nothing I wrote here is factually false, and what remains is just my personal opinion as a principled user of FOSS. A bit of tolerance for others' viewpoints is in order.
Standard repos might be were many discover things, but those things don't normally get there until they've build a following, so the random developers page is the more significant vector overall.
And HNN requires either or both: opinions must be insightful or interesting.
And what is either of those is objective, self-evident, and not even slightly subjective.
Right? How is this not merely a blanket way to assert opinions that are themselves boring and un-insightful ("hosting opinions are forbidden" is the de facto claim)?
Hosting on Github has been an up voted story several HNN times. Yet here its not interesting or insightful.
If the point is "potshots" why not ask or suggest more developed opinions instead of potshotting the potshots? Why not clearly note that "potshot comments on any topic are not optimal" instead of making this seem to be about hosting or what is insightful?
A down vote is not meaningful feedback and clarity tends to work better.
"Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#:~:text=Use...
If TFA is about a tool, I tend to downvote comments that don't talk about the merits of tool but rather about the hosting website, the language it's written in, whether or not it "smells AI", English mistakes in the readme, and so on.
On the other side, if I reply to a comment I always upvote it, even if my reply is to refute it. In fact if I felt the need to add anything to it, it was by definition worth dealing with it!
So why are you waiting? Be the change you seek. Simply become a maintainer of a distro, and publish the package there. Repeat for all the major distros.
Seriously I don't know why you'd do this in Bash. Crazy choice.
I do not understand them.
tail -n 8 $HISTFILE > script.sh
I guess this just isn’t obvious to me. Where do you see the boundary between “interface to the os” and “programming language”?
I remember somebody once telling me that they had learned vi because "it was always installed". Well, no, technically, the only editor you can be sure is there is ed. So, you know, learn that. I was surprised that they actually did.
Bash is syntactically not perfect, I agree. However it's a well known, mature, stable environment. LLMs can write it well if you need them to. If it was perfect, we'd never have had Perl, and as a result we'd never have had Ruby, Python and other scripting languages.
But I like it's a tool that doesn't require me to go reach for a package manager and some build tools I don't always have on every system.
Then you wonder why it doesn’t work in your other environment. Then you find that GNU vs BSD sed have different syntax.
Better to start with Python once you’re doing more than coordinating well known other tools.
Unfortunately, ed has been omitted from the default installation of recent debians, at least. I had to install it manually.
If I wanted an OS without a text editor, I'd use emacs.
It also has no other dependency, which is also good. I have written helper script to run coding agents in a container. And you guessed it, it's in bash. For the reasons I just wrote down. Should it have to grow I would rewrite it, but not currently.
like a microvm with normal language features. Something you can and want to actually attach a debugger onto it. Something independent of architecture too.
I just hate bash :| Even just using bash and curl and checking if its a website or an error page...
Is this what you have in mind?
I'm sure that ubuntu LTS also extended the life of this disaster + some tool you wanted to use which never upgraded.
GNU Radio took ages
Many people have made micro Tcl’s too if you want something even lighter.
It has a built in subst command no need for a template engine!
AFAIK the Go jupyter kernel does something like this but it sequentially links previous compilation results to the current cell. Memory use is probably not great for a shell care though (since each linked Go library is a whole separate Go runtime).
I use Janet[0] for this.
I have moved away to Jekyll again but there's always something alluring about single file things - single file webapps, single file LLMs (llamafile) and others
Because bash is maybe worst than C for this task.
I dont have time to play these ego games and prefix everything with "AI wrote 90% of this codebase" instead "I built". I just thought this would be useful to share. If you dont think this is useful then dont use it, it's that simple...