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Comment by kelmop | Hacker News Reader

I knew my reply will be heavily hammered by rubyists. There is nothing wrong in the language but I think that shell tools should be written in C or in some other low level language without complex dependencies over ruby or java or python etc. or any other non-default installation stuff

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You're not only being down-voted by Rubyists. For something that deals heavily with string manipulation and isn't speed-sensitive, C is most definitely not the best language to use.

I'm afraid that ship has sailed a long time ago:

    $ for bin in /bin/* /usr/bin/* /usr/local/bin/*; do
    >     if [[ -f $bin && "$(cat $bin | head -c 2)" == "#!" ]];then
    >         echo $bin
    >     fi
    > done | wc -l

    544

I imagine most of these are written in Perl (though there's surely a fair amount of Python and shell scripting in there, too), but that's still a high-level language with a complex runtime and dependencies compared to C.

To be fair, there's still about twice as many compiled binaries on that box, but having system commands written in a non-C language is by no means an exception.

I was curious about what the spread would be, so for one data point:

    $ file -b /bin/* /usr/bin/* /usr/local/bin/* | cut -f1 -d, | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10
       1028 ELF 64-bit LSB executable
        388 POSIX shell script
        265 Perl script
        130 ELF 64-bit LSB shared object
        126 Python script
         46 Ruby script
         38 Bourne-Again shell script
         24 symbolic link to `mtools'
         18 setuid ELF 64-bit LSB executable
         16 setgid ELF 64-bit LSB executable

After the top 10, most were symbolic links. So, seems shell scripts are by far the most common, with perl and python scripts not too far behind, and ruby making a decent appearance.

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