Ask HN: How can I get better at bash?

Is there a "proper scripting language" somewhere that supports the same first-class access to Unix programs and the same piping | syntax that shells in general do?

I would love something like that.

In both my personal and professional life, I have the opposite conclusion. Bash is only for the simplest scripts and pipelines, and everything else (assuming you're going to use it more than once) gets written in Python or Go.

The Bash syntax is not daunting, or if it is that's never been the problem with Bash. The problem is that Bash or shell programming in general gives you a million ways to shoot yourself in the foot and maybe one or two obscure, funny-looking ways to do what you want. Like iterating over the files in a directory, for example. If you think that's easy in Bash you have either have a funny definition of easy or you're forgetting a few corner cases. Or getting the output from a program—did you know that $(my_prog) or `my_prog` modifies the program output?

For containers we do everything declaratively.

I'm ok at bash, but I do not default to complicated bash scripts for my needs. I make little reusable tools. For example I have a tool aliased that makes it easy to apply quick ruby code. For example

echo "345.44

544.50" | rg "€#{l}: €#{(l.to_f * 3).to_i}"

Produces the following output:

€345.44: €1036

€544.50: €1633

Based on this code:

https://gist.github.com/zachaysan/4a31386f944ed31a3f8a920c85...

I find it's much faster to be productive like this than it is to try to do the same with ruby -e because I really only want to manipulate single incoming lines. I don't want to have to write the looping code or the code that sets variables or what have you.

Also, sometimes it gets confusing what tools are just bash functions or alias and which are scripts, so if you ever forget what a tools definition is just type:

type toolname

As for actually answering your question, look at your friend's dotfiles on their github account to learn which tools and tricks they use and when you don't know how something works ask them questions. People will usually point you in the right direction.

As an alternative, you could also look into PowerShell. it's open source and cross platform. I use it because it's really powerful on Windows.

In any programming language, you learn by practice. Given that your shell does so much, that's the easiest place to find tasks to practice on. I have been leaning on my shell scripts to do a lot of automation. The list is long and I just pick something from that list to work on for most days.

If you don't have system automation that you want to work on, then you probably have a lot of personal data that you can work with. I have scripts setup to manipulate data exports from the various services I consume and then remix that data in my own database. My shell scripts can get the data, operate on it and then shove it into a DB. Then I'll use something else to display that data.

For scripting, I recommend the rc shell from plan9, which is the one I use for my shell scripts. It is only when I want to share a script with other people that I consider using /bin/sh, and even then more often than not I've gone for rc.

I invite you to read about it: http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/rc.

I find the control structures simpler and more elegant, and overall its design feels more consistent. For example, consider an if statement in bash:

  if [ condition ]; then
    ...
  else
    ...
  fi

And now in rc:

  if (condition) {
    ...
  } else {
    ...
  }

Or a case statement in bash:

  case $1 in
    "bar")
      ... ;;
    "baz")
      ... ;;
  esac

And expressed in rc:

  switch ($1) {
    case "bar"
      ...
    case "baz"
      ...
  }

In the past, I've used it as my shell too, but now I use it only for scripting. I think you can install it in most platforms.