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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

I keep seeing people mention "a mess of shell scripts", and then use replacements which are dozens if not hundreds of lines of custom-configuration files.

Shell scripts, when you're not dealing with autotools generated script, aren't really that big, or even that complicated.

Not to mention that the ability to chain disparate tools and subshells can be incredibly elegant and powerful.

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I agree mostly. But when you're in the node ecosystem, often times you need to run JS as part of the build. For example, you might need to create some JSON data as part of the build.

I ended up writing my own build library (npm install crankshaft). Docs aren't up yet, but here's what build scripts look like - https://github.com/jeswin/hitchslap/blob/master/build.js (simple example) and https://github.com/jeswin/fora/blob/master/www-client/build-... (more complex, with dependent tasks)

> Shell scripts, when you're not dealing with autotools generated script, aren't really that big, or even that complicated.

They're not always portable. Some people develop on windows.

Windows offers shell scripts as well. Powershell, instead of Bash/Zsh/..., but they still offer many of the same opportunities.

Considering that teams frequently homogenize on one type of machine - bet it windows or Mac or Linux, shell scripts are typically portable enough for these use cases.

Msysgit on Windows comes with a bash emulator (for running hooks) that could be used in a cross-platform build process.

Indeed. For JS projects these days I just use npm as the command-line tool. npm scripts gives you an easy way to create commands for building, watching, etc.

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