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Comment by wltr | Hacker News Reader

Been doing bash scripting for years. Tried Go recently, on my, it’s so much better for everything OS scripting. I regret I haven’t started with Go years ago. All my scripts are rewritten to Go. I kept only a handful, those that are just a few lines and no logic.

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I regret not going with bash or even sh when I had the chance. Nothing beats that for ubiquity and getting shit done.

Go is behind, specifically, you have no guarantees that a given machine has Go installed, and doing stuff like gluing commands together, inspecting some files, pipe output around, or automate the boring thing in 30 seconds.

Sure Go beats bash or sh when the thing you are doing starts to become real software, but that is a problem that sits between the chair and the keyboard.

That kept me away from the rewrite, but actually you can just throw a bin onto your server. At least for all my servers, I can do that. Migrating to Go helped me clean like hundreds of scripts into just a handful (tens) of slightly more complex, but unified programs with shared logic. I kept sticking to bash, not realising the complexity grew up already, and having a pile of simple scripts isn’t as simple as I thought. Go solved this beautifully, all the scripts were rewritten within just a month (with Claude assistance, but I’ve been checking on the code, it was OK), and now I can maintain them with less mental overhead.

Are you using 'go run' or compiling these scripts? Just curious about what you are up to as I was considering moving my scripts from bash to go.

Not sure if it's obvious, but "go run" is just a thin wrapper around "go build" which compiles your Go code to a temporary location and then runs it in a single step.

Most of the time I use go build, or precisely make install with custom Makefile. For the one-time ad-hoc tools (vibe coded, by the way), I may use go run. My point is use the simplest tool, if it’s a little bit more complex than a few lines, it’s better in Go than bash. Here, I rather mean it’s better in any real programming language. Just… well, Go is really simple and with some GPT assistance you may be just one prompt and a minute away from automating some routine tasks. I try to automate as much as I can notice. E.g. I have a special script (now program) which moves files and directories from one location (synced documents) to another (archive on a disk). This is just a very simple operation, but doing it automatically feels very different. I’d highly recommend on trying something similar. Previously, I thought bash is good enough for this (and it is!), but Go is just better for me personally. And bonus thing, it works much faster.

Having explicit and unavoidable error handling (which Go of course has in spades) is a particular improvement when writing/replacing Bash scripts.

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