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-urlencodedrequest is super easy withcurl. 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.curlalready does all that. - Need to read from a
curlresponse and it’s JSON? Reach forjq. - Instead of having to set up a connection object/instance to your database, give
sqlite,psql,duckdbor 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
Ubuntuordebianoralpine, 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?
If by this you mean that the Bash syntax for doing certain things is horrible and that it could be expressed more clearly in something else, then yes, I agree, otherwise I'm not sure this is a problem on the same level as others.
OP could pick any language and have the same problem. Except maybe Python, but even that strays into symbolic line noise once a project gets big enough.
Either way, comments can be helpful when strange constructs are used. There are comments in my own Bash scripts that say what a line is doing rather than just why precisely because of this.
But I think the main issue with Bash (and maybe other shells), is that it's parsed and run line by line. There's nothing like a full script syntax check before the script is run, which most other languages provide as a bare minimum.
Personally, I don't see python far off from bash. Decent for small scripts, bad for anything bigger. While not necessarily natively available, it's readily available and more portable (Windows), and has a rich library ecosystem.
Personally, I dislike the indent syntax. And the various tooling and complexities don't feel approachable or stable, and structuring not good.
But maybe that's me. Many people seem to enjoy or reach for python even for complex systems.
More structured and stable programming languages do not have these issues.