> Indent 2 spaces
It's interesting how quickly the 2-space indent became the new norm
Shell Style Guide
51–60 of 336 posts
Re: Shell Style Guide
#52>Bash is the only shell scripting language permitted for executables. Whelp, wrong right off the bat. I'm gonna get down my my knees here and beg everyone reading: use POSIX shell. Do not write scripts with bash. Do not write scripts with zsh. Do not write scripts with fish. Use POSIX shell. sh has a really bad interactive mode (so does bash), so I'm not gonna give anyone a hard time for using another shell as their…
> Do not write scripts with bash. It's a bit too late for that. Bash is pretty much the de facto default shell for linux. Telling people not to use bash scripts is like telling web devs not to use javascript or OS devs not to use C. It may change in the future, but bash is so entrenched, it's going to take an extraordinary use case for people to move from bash.
>Telling people not to use bash scripts is like telling web devs not to use javascript or OS devs not to use C.
Wow, this comparison is totally whack. Javascript and C are both standardized and the former is the only option when using a web browser.
It's never too late. We managed to get people off of ANSI C and there's a similar amount of difference between ANSI* C and C89 as there is between bash and sh.
* correction: pre-ANSI
Re: Shell Style Guide
#53I absolutely hate coding in bash or looking at bash or suddenly being in Windows and being up a tree because bash isn't supported well (it is now if you install WSL). I only use bash to set environment variables and maybe string together 2 or 3 build commands. If I need so much as an if statement, I'm going to switch to a real programming language.
Often times it's easier to use binaries and manage their input/output through shell code. Having a good understanding of shell code will also allow you to easily write slick one-liners that will save you lots of time.
For basic file system operations it’s a necessity. Write 10-20 line python script or type a one line grep/awk/sed piipeline to spit out the contents of some files?
Re: Shell Style Guide
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Competing implementations sounds like a potential downside to me. That’s just more possible configurations where a bug could be hiding. Even if you use standard posix shell, you’d be wise to target a single implementation and stick to it.
So you think that competition between gcc and clang is harmful to the C and C++ ecosystems? If you find bugs in an implementation of POSIX sh, you should report it to that implementation. Multiple competing implementations is a sign of a good standard, it proves the standard's correctness and demonstrates its maturity. There is no standard to hold bash to. Any strange behavior of it might be decided as by design and…
To be more precise, my point was that you should only be targeting one of the implementations anyway. I don't see how it's a good use of people's time to be testing their scripts against every shell that claims to be sh-compatible, especially at a place like Google where the scripts are almost all being written to run on completely Google-controlled environments.
But I didn't think about the bug vs. by-design issue and how that is remedied by a well-defined standard. That does seem to be a factor in favor of using a standardized language. But it doesn’t seem different in principle than depending on any software. It is liable to change and leave you with a difficult decision of forking the library or modifying your code that consumes it. Given bash’s ubiquity, it seems reasonable to expect a good level of stability.
If you only target standards, the lowest-common-denominator of functionality, you will be poorer for it. Linux, for example, has all sorts of performance and functionality enhancing features over what POSIX provides.
Re: Shell Style Guide
#55>Bash is the only shell scripting language permitted for executables. Whelp, wrong right off the bat. I'm gonna get down my my knees here and beg everyone reading: use POSIX shell. Do not write scripts with bash. Do not write scripts with zsh. Do not write scripts with fish. Use POSIX shell. sh has a really bad interactive mode (so does bash), so I'm not gonna give anyone a hard time for using another shell as their…
> Do not write scripts with bash. It's a bit too late for that. Bash is pretty much the de facto default shell for linux. Telling people not to use bash scripts is like telling web devs not to use javascript or OS devs not to use C. It may change in the future, but bash is so entrenched, it's going to take an extraordinary use case for people to move from bash.
bash is completely out of date on macOS (GPL2 vs. GPL3), and not shipped on any *BSD AFAICT.
Some Linux distro don't ship it either (void, alpine IIRC).
And, most of the time, bash is used because people don't know any better, see e.g. https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/8405/files
Re: Shell Style Guide
#56> Indent 2 spaces It's interesting how quickly the 2-space indent became the new norm
All Google style guides use two spaces.
Re: Shell Style Guide
#57>Bash is the only shell scripting language permitted for executables. Whelp, wrong right off the bat. I'm gonna get down my my knees here and beg everyone reading: use POSIX shell. Do not write scripts with bash. Do not write scripts with zsh. Do not write scripts with fish. Use POSIX shell. sh has a really bad interactive mode (so does bash), so I'm not gonna give anyone a hard time for using another shell as their…
Truly portable shell scripts cannot define functions. Have you ever seen autotools' output? No thanks, I'll be impure and wrong and get the job done. Also your comment is off-topic... not sure why you see every thread about Bash as the right place to start this pedantic flameskirmish.
Re: Shell Style Guide
#58I absolutely hate coding in bash or looking at bash or suddenly being in Windows and being up a tree because bash isn't supported well (it is now if you install WSL). I only use bash to set environment variables and maybe string together 2 or 3 build commands. If I need so much as an if statement, I'm going to switch to a real programming language.
And on Windows there is something better than Bash, called PowerShell.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but that's nonsense.
Historically, PowerShell was supposed to be a replacement for cmd.exe and roughly equivalent to bash, yet suitable for the Windows environment. They tried early on to port some of the UNIX & Linux tools to Windows and it didn't fly, so this is what we're left with.
Although parts of Powershell are open source now, I suspect the mere existence of WSL means that Microsoft understands it has more to gain from compatibility with the rest of the world (Bash is nigh-everywhere) than imposing their particular philosophy on people.
(See also, Apple's decision to adopt UNIX underpinnings)
I'm prepared to be wrong if PowerShell actually gets used outside of Windows, but I wouldn't bet on it.
Re: Shell Style Guide
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which actually supports linux with PS 6.0+
Unless you want secure strings.. then it complains about "Crypt32.dll" not being available.
Or want to pipe data without PowerShell mangling it[0]
PowerShell is materially worse than bash for a great many purposes because of this design choice alone.
[0] https://brianreiter.org/2010/01/29/powershells-object-pipeli...
Re: Shell Style Guide
#60> Indent 2 spaces It's interesting how quickly the 2-space indent became the new norm
All Google style guides use two spaces.
not the python one! https://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html
anything other than 4 spaces for python look out of place for me.