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Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things

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Re: Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things

#31

Post by pizza234 »

Beltalowda wrote: post #19

> Use bash. Using zsh or fish or any other, will make it hard for others to understand / collaborate. Among all shells, bash strikes a good balance between portability and DX. I think fish is quite a bit different in terms of syntax and semantics (I'm not very familiar with it), but zsh is essentially the same as bash except without most of the needless footguns and awkwardness. zsh also has many more advanced featur…

I don't know fish, but I don't consider zsh a step in the right direction, as it tries to be just a cleaned up Bash, which is not enough.

There is a general problem in the fact that a radical evolution of glue languages wouldn't be popular because devs rather use Python, and small evolutions wouldn't be popular (ie. zsh), because they end up being confusing (since they're still close to Bash) and not bringing significant advantages.

I'm curious why there haven't been attempts to write a modern glue language (mind that languages like Python don't fit this class). I guess that Powershell (which I don't know, though) has been the only attempt.

Re: Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things

#32

Post by benreesman »

Beltalowda wrote: post #19

> Use bash. Using zsh or fish or any other, will make it hard for others to understand / collaborate. Among all shells, bash strikes a good balance between portability and DX. I think fish is quite a bit different in terms of syntax and semantics (I'm not very familiar with it), but zsh is essentially the same as bash except without most of the needless footguns and awkwardness. zsh also has many more advanced featur…

A little personal color: I’m kind of a terminal tweak-fanatic but I’ve stuck with bash.

Ten years or so ago the cool kids were using zsh: which is in general a pretty reasonable move, it’s got way more command-line amenities than bash (at least built in).

Today fish is the fucking business: fish is so much more fun as a CLI freak.

But I guess I’ve got enough PTSD around when k8s or it’s proprietary equivalents get stuck that I always wanted to be not only functional but fast in outage-type scenarios that I kept bash as a daily driver.

Writing shell scripts of any kind is godawful, the equivalent python is the code you want to own, but it’s universality is a real selling point, like why I keep half an eye on Perl5 even though I loathe it: it may suck but it’s always there when the klaxon is going off.

The best possible software is useless if it’s not installed.

Re: Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things

#33

Post by lockedinspace »

This is not a best practices guide, please look forward to: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashGuide

For example, using cd "$(dirname "$0")" to get the scripts location is not reliable, you could use a more sophisticated option such as: $(dirname $BASH_SOURCE)

Re: Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things

#34

Post by selectnull »

> Use the .sh (or .bash) extension for your file. It may be fancy to not have an extension for your script, but unless your case explicitly depends on it, you’re probably just trying to do clever stuff. Clever stuff are hard to understand.

I don't agree with this one. When I name my script without extension (btw, .sh is fine, .bash is ugly) I want my script to look just like any other command: as a user I do not care what the language program is written in, I care about its output and what it does.

When I develop a script, I get the correct syntax highlight becuase of the shebang so the extension doesn't matter.

The rest of the post is great.

Re: Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things

#35

Post by asicsp »

See also:

* safe ways to do things in bash: https://github.com/anordal/shellharden/blob/master/how_to_do...

* better scripting: https://robertmuth.blogspot.in/2012/08/better-bash-scripting...

* robust scripting: https://www.davidpashley.com/articles/writing-robust-shell-s...

Re: Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things

#36

Post by imgabe »

Beltalowda wrote: post #19

> Use bash. Using zsh or fish or any other, will make it hard for others to understand / collaborate. Among all shells, bash strikes a good balance between portability and DX. I think fish is quite a bit different in terms of syntax and semantics (I'm not very familiar with it), but zsh is essentially the same as bash except without most of the needless footguns and awkwardness. zsh also has many more advanced featur…

Is there any way to get MacOS to stop nagging you about zsh?

Re: Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things

#37

Post by asicsp »

selectnull wrote: post #34

> Use the .sh (or .bash) extension for your file. It may be fancy to not have an extension for your script, but unless your case explicitly depends on it, you’re probably just trying to do clever stuff. Clever stuff are hard to understand. I don't agree with this one. When I name my script without extension (btw, .sh is fine, .bash is ugly) I want my script to look just like any other command: as a user I do not care…

My thumb rule is no extension if the script goes to the local bin folder and `.sh` otherwise. Beyond syntax highlighting, the extension also helps for wildcard matching for file operations (`ls`, `cp`, `for` loop, etc).

Re: Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things

#39

Post by IncRnd »

There is an error with the template script on a fully patched m1 macbook. $1 is unbound, unless you provide an argument. This seems to be an utterly basic oversight for a template script from someone attempting to educate on bash's best practices. Especially true for seeking a "good balance between portability and DX".

Re: Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things

#40

Post by Beltalowda »

rgrau wrote: post #16

> If appropriate, change to the script’s directory close to the start of the script. > And it’s usually always appropriate. I wouldn't think so. You don't know where your script will be called from, and many times the parameters to the script are file paths, which are relative to the caller's path. So you usually don't want to do it. I collected many tips&tricks from my experience with shell scripts that you may also…

In e.g. "Read the great Oil Shell blogpost." it's not clear there's a link there: the "blogpost" is a link but you only see that if you hover your mouse.
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