Bash Scripting: Why didn't I start this earlier?

Personally I use bash when I need to, well, script shell commands. Anything that is reasonably described as series of shell commands, filter/pipes.

There are a lot of best-practices that one need to adapt though, and there's definitively a learning-curve. Generally scripts should work under things like dash, and not be bash-specific. That means delegating some work to sed/grep/awk (or being really "clever").

I've found that using functions, and passing arguments rather than setting (global) variables help a lot -- and if you get to the point that you really want do debug, you're better off rewriting in something like python.

I've never liked perl -- it's always seemed like a bit of a pointless exercise in moving side-ways rather than "up". I've never had to move away from shell scripts out of performance needs, only out of maintenance needs -- and for me perl buys me nothing in that direction.

Now, things like fabric[f] can make sense -- but the benefit of (ba)sh is that it's guaranteed to be there (on a nix platform) -- and it is great for bootstrapping.

I'm not* a fan of how some projects use (ba)sh, though. The ones that list instructions like these (and there have been a few lately):

  curl http(s)://great-tool.com/install | sudo bash

They often a) don't use https and b) require sudo/root blindly (rather than at least wrapping what needs sudo in something like:

      prompt -p "Need superuser permission for apt-yum-install libfoo [y/n]: " ans
      if [ "${ans}" == "y" ]; then
          sudo apt-yum-install libfoo
      else
         echo "Aborted."
         exit 1
      fi

Which generally works rather painlessly -- and could be further "automated" by allowing a --yes-go-ahead, or checking if the script is running as root.

[f]: http://fabfile.org

My experience is that bash is faster and easier for below 20 lines. But if things grow, you'll wish you had used a real scripting languages.

All useful tools grow.

Same here, I could never relate to bash's specific syntax, so I just started to do everything in Python. I'm thinking about fully switching to Julia for this though, as it offers an easier way of integrating Unix commands.

Dependencies are another huge issue if you want to be cross-platform. A Ruby script (for example) relies on the Ruby interpreter, which works the same cross-platform. If it has other dependencies, there's an established way to declare and install them.

In contrast, a bash program calls out to lots of little programs: sed, awk, grep, etc. Different platforms have different implementations which take different flags, etc.

My friend and I just spent a couple of days getting some bash scripts that ran fine under Cygwin to also run on OSX. It was painful.

I found PowerShell quite capable as both a shell and a programming language, scaling up to larger scripts and yet remain readable.

Pash sadly isn't complete enough to be used, though.

Author makes that point in the very first paragraph.

if you're going to make a snide comment, shouldn't you get the years correct? I'm pretty sure bash has been around since the late '80s or early '90s.

you thinking of perl