• UndercoverUlrikHD
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    11 hours ago

    If you’re going to write scripts that requires installing software, might as well use something like python though? Most Linux distros ship also ship with python installed

    • Victor@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      A shell script can be much more agile, potent, and concise, depending on the use case.

      E.g. if you want to make a facade (wrapper) around a program, that’s much cleaner in $SHELL. All you’re doing is checking which keyword/command the user wanted, and then executing the commands associated with what you want to achieve, like maybe displaying a notification and updating a global environment variable or something.

      Executing a bunch of commands and chaining their output together in python is surely much more cumbersome than just typing them out next to each other separated by a pipe character. It’s higher-level. 👍

      If it’s just text in text out though, sure, mostly equivalent, but for me this is rarely the use case for a script.

      • UndercoverUlrikHD
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        2 hours ago

        I’m not anti bash or fish, I’ve written in both just this week, but if we’re talking about readability/syntax as this post is about, and you want an alternative to bash, I’d say python is a more natural alternative. Fish syntax is still fairly ugly compared to most programming languages in my opinion.

        Different strokes for different folks I suppose.