Earlier quoted context omitted.
I typically agree, but I don't think its as simple as a "screenful of lines" criteria. I find it useful when most of your work is wiring other command line tools together. When that's most of your work, shell scripting feels like it has the best affordances. Anything that gets too fancy beyond this, with anything that resembles an algorithm or computation, you'll feel real pain :) Bash doesn't even support floating p…
For me this is is it, if you're stringing together a load of other command line tools then a large well structured shell script is perfectly fine. A typical task in my day job is extracting metadata from and transcoding large AV archives, I always use a bash for this because I'm mainly stringing together tools like ffmpeg or sox, making directories, tempfiles, creating chesksum manifests, etc. Also I typically do thi…
There's a library for Node called Zx (https://github.com/google/zx) that provides a more shell-liked interface for Node.
I've been working on something in Python, inspired by Zx and Xonsh (https://xon.sh/), with syntax like this:
from pathlib import Path
from pyshell import Pipeline
args = ["123", "456"]
f = Path("out.txt")
with Pipeline() as p:
p.exec("a") | p.exec("b", *args) | p.exec("c", "x", "y") >> f
Is this something you'd use? It's slow going for me because it basically involves writing a compiler and I have approximately zero idea of what I'm doing. Knowing that other people would find it useful helps me stay motivated to keep working on it! Or if someone who theoretically is the primary audience doesn't find it useful, it might mean that I should spend my energy on other things.