from Hacker News

I Dislike Shell Scripting

by Nales on 2/15/23, 5:17 PM with 5 comments

• by PaulHoule on 2/15/23, 5:26 PM

  I like bash for programs that go in a straight line from bottom to top and where you don’t need to think about quoting so much. If there are loops, conditionals, and such, you are better off with a real language. If you stick to the standard library and don’t mess around with pip, Python is fine for simple scripts.

  (I love writing bash scripts that do loops by writing an awk 1-liner that you pipe into bash, I don’t have to read the awk manual to do this, whereas control structures in bash are so far from the mainstream that I have to look them up in the manual every time I need to use them… you really aren’t supposed to do this because script injection is possible. The shell scripting mafia says, “use xargs” but that involves reading an awful man page for two hours so you can do something that takes two minutes in a language not so far from the mainstram.)

• by bitfield on 2/15/23, 5:29 PM

  Try https://bitfieldconsulting.com/golang/scripting instead?

• by metadat on 2/15/23, 7:49 PM

  Nales: FYI the site is not responding, article not currently accessible.