This may make some people pull their hair out, but I’d love to hear some arguments. I’ve had the impression that people really don’t like bash, not from here, but just from people I’ve worked with.

There was a task at work where we wanted something that’ll run on a regular basis, and doesn’t do anything complex aside from reading from the database and sending the output to some web API. Pretty common these days.

I can’t think of a simpler scripting language to use than bash. Here are my reasons:

  • Reading from the environment is easy, and so is falling back to some value; just do ${VAR:-fallback}; no need to write another if-statement to check for nullity. Wanna check if a variable’s set to something expected? if [[ <test goes here> ]]; then <handle>; fi
  • Reading from arguments is also straightforward; instead of a import os; os.args[1] in Python, you just do $1.
  • Sending a file via HTTP as part of an application/x-www-form-urlencoded request is super easy with curl. In most programming languages, you’d have to manually open the file, read them into bytes, before putting it into your request for the http library that you need to import. curl already does all that.
  • Need to read from a curl response and it’s JSON? Reach for jq.
  • Instead of having to set up a connection object/instance to your database, give sqlite, psql, duckdb or whichever cli db client a connection string with your query and be on your way.
  • Shipping is… fairly easy? Especially if docker is common in your infrastructure. Pull Ubuntu or debian or alpine, install your dependencies through the package manager, and you’re good to go. If you stay within Linux and don’t have to deal with differences in bash and core utilities between different OSes (looking at you macOS), and assuming you tried to not to do anything too crazy and bring in necessary dependencies in the form of calling them, it should be fairly portable.

Sure, there can be security vulnerability concerns, but you’d still have to deal with the same problems with your Pythons your Rubies etc.

For most bash gotchas, shellcheck does a great job at warning you about them, and telling how to address those gotchas.

There are probably a bunch of other considerations but I can’t think of them off the top of my head, but I’ve addressed a bunch before.

So what’s the dealeo? What am I missing that may not actually be addressable?

  • MajorHavoc
    5·
    7 hours ago

    I actually (also) love bash, and use it like crazy.

    What I really hate is that bash is so locked in legacy that it’s bad features (on a scripting language scale, which isn’t fair) (and of which there are too many to enumerate) are now locked in permanently.

    I also hate how convention has kept other shells from replacing bash’s worst features with better modern alternatives.

    To some extent, I’m railing against how hard it is to write a good Lexer and a Parser, honestly. Now that bash is stable, there’s little interest in improving it. Particularly since one can just invoke a better scripting language for complex work.

    I mourn the sweet spot that Perl occupies, that Bash and Python sit on either side of, looking longingly across the gap that separated their practical use cases.

    I have lost hope that Python will achieve shell script levels of pragmatism. Although the invoke library is a frigging cool attempt.

    But I hold on to my sorrow and anger that Bash hasn’t bridged the gap, and never will, because whatever it can invoke, it’s methods of responding to that invocation are trapped in messes like “if…fi”.

    • Badland9085@lemm.eeOP
      2·
      7 hours ago

      What do you suppose bash could do here? When a program reaches some critical mass in terms of adoption, all your bugs and features are features of your program, and, love it or hate it, somebody’s day is going to be ruined if you do your bug fixes, unless, of course, it’s a fix for something that clearly doesn’t work in the very sense of the word.

      I’m sure there’s space for a clear alternative to arise though, as far as scripting languages go. Whether we’ll see that anytime soon is hard to tell, cause yeah, a good lexer and parser in the scripting landscape is hard work.

      • MajorHavoc
        2·
        6 hours ago

        What do you suppose bash could do here?

        • For the love of all that is holy, it’s not 1970, we don’t need to continue to tolerate “if … fi”
        • Really everything about how bash handles logic bridging multiple lines of a file. (loops, error handling, etc)

        I’m sure there’s space for a clear alternative to arise though, as far as scripting languages go.

        The first great alternative/attempt does exist, in PowerShell. (Honorable mention to Zsh, but I find it has most of the same issues as bash without gaining the killer features of pwsh.)

        But I’m a cranky old person so I despise (and deeply appreciate!) PowerShell for a completely different set of reasons.

        At the moment I use whichever gets the job done, but I would love to stop switching quite so often.

        I hold more hope that PowerShell will grow to bridge the gap than that a fork of bash will. The big thing PowerShell lacks is bash’s extra decades of debugging and refinement.