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Ruby: A great language for shell scripts

lucasoshiro.github.io

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Re: Ruby: A great language for shell scripts

#71

Post by samatman »

The things which make Ruby good for shell scripts are, to a large degree, things it inherited from Perl. Which was, and is, a great language for scripting.

People use it a lot less these days, for a lot of reasons, some better than others. I myself do simple stuff in bash, and pull out some Python for more complex scripting. My Perl chops have withered, last time I was paid to use it was 21 years ago, but it really is a great scripting language, and you'll find it installed on a great deal more systems than Ruby.

One of these days I'll give Raku a spin, just for old time's sake.

Re: Ruby: A great language for shell scripts

#72

Post by corytheboyd »

Hell yeah! I’ll never forget being fooled by HN that you have to use Perl if you want portable scripts that aren’t bash, writing a whole script with it, and having a coworker politely, yet firmly, tell me that I am dumb and it should just be Ruby… and it was a script I was checking into a Rails app! It’s even trivial to include dependencies with bundler inline https://bundler.io/guides/bundler_in_a_single_file_ruby_scri...

Re: Ruby: A great language for shell scripts

#73

Post by danmur »

seabrookmx wrote: post #13
codesnik wrote: post #9

I sometimes wonder why we don't see ruby used for shell stuff more often. It inherited most of the good stuff for shell scripting from Perl, and Perl took a lot of it's syntax from sh and sed and awk, so almost anything you can do in shell script you can do in ruby, but with an option of making it gradually less terse and more readable, while having sane variables and data handling from the start. Also ruby is great…

I think golang is used because you can easily create a single static binary, which is incredibly easy to distribute. I often find non-trivial CLI tools written in Python cumbersome because of the dependency wrangling necessary.

Bundle it into a pex and distribute that. Its still way large but its easy to distribute.

Re: Ruby: A great language for shell scripts

#74

Post by corytheboyd »

lambdaba wrote: post #8

The greatest feature for this is inline deps, something very rare to have built-in (I've only found Deno to have a similar feature): https://bundler.io/guides/bundler_in_a_single_file_ruby_scri...

Yay I’m glad someone else knows about this and thinks it’s awesome too :) It’s crazy I didn’t find it until I was digging through bundler docs looking for something completely unrelated

Re: Ruby: A great language for shell scripts

#75

Post by delichon »

MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #69
cyclotron3k wrote: post #19

Totally agree! Other tricks I rely on: a) put a `binding.irb` (or `binding.pry`) in any rescue block you may have in your script - it'll allow you to jump in and see what went wrong in an interactive way. (You'll need a `require 'irb'` in your script too, ofc) b) I always use `Pathname` instead of `File` - it's part of the standard library, is a drop in replacement for `File` (and `Dir`) and generally has a much more…

> You'll need a `require 'irb'` in your script too, ofc irb is a part of Ruby core, so this isn’t true. (It may have been at one point? I’m not sure.) I love binding.irb. I use it all the time.

Me too (binding.pry). I think of it as REPL based development.

Re: Ruby: A great language for shell scripts

#77

Post by __loam »

cortesoft wrote: post #5
djbusby wrote: post #2

These are great points, if you already have Ruby in your stack. For me, when Bash ain't enough I upgrade to the Project language (PHP, Python, JS, etc). For compiled project I reach for LSB language (Perl, Python) before introducing a new dependency.

Ruby is fantastic for the main project language, too! And is also standard on many Linux distros.

Ruby is unsuitable for large projects for the same reason python is, but it also lacks the huge ecosystem and labor pool that python has. When I'm interviewing and a company tells me ruby is the main language, I end the call.

Re: Ruby: A great language for shell scripts

#78

Post by SoftTalker »

codesnik wrote: post #9

I sometimes wonder why we don't see ruby used for shell stuff more often. It inherited most of the good stuff for shell scripting from Perl, and Perl took a lot of it's syntax from sh and sed and awk, so almost anything you can do in shell script you can do in ruby, but with an option of making it gradually less terse and more readable, while having sane variables and data handling from the start. Also ruby is great…

> why we don't see ruby used for shell stuff more often

Simple, ruby is not installed by default. Even Python, while it is on (almost?) all modern Linux distributions, is not installed on the BSDs.

Re: Ruby: A great language for shell scripts

#79

Post by mikepurvis »

danmur wrote: post #73
seabrookmx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think golang is used because you can easily create a single static binary, which is incredibly easy to distribute. I often find non-trivial CLI tools written in Python cumbersome because of the dependency wrangling necessary.

Bundle it into a pex and distribute that. Its still way large but its easy to distribute.

Pex was also the solution I landed on after evaluating several non-container options for distributing a Python project to arbitrary Linux hosts.

It works well but with one huge caveat: although you bring the stuff required to reconstitute the venv with you, you’re actually still using the system’s python executable and stdlib!! So for example if you want to make a project targeting all supported Ubuntu LTS versions, you have to include the wheels for every possible python version you might hit.

Ultimately this boils down to there not really being a story for statically compiled python, so in most normal cases you end up wanting a chroot and at that point you’re in a container anyway.

Re: Ruby: A great language for shell scripts

#80

Post by intelVISA »

passthejoe wrote: post #39
seabrookmx wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think golang is used because you can easily create a single static binary, which is incredibly easy to distribute. I often find non-trivial CLI tools written in Python cumbersome because of the dependency wrangling necessary.

Golang's not so secret weapon

Hard to miss those >100 meg 'single binaries'
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