People have really been singing praises of Powershell huh. I should give that a try some time.

But yeah, we wield tools that each come with their own risks and caveats, and none of them are perfect for everything, but some are easier (including writing it and addressing fallovers for it) to use in certain situations than others.

It’s just hard to tell if people’s fear/disdain/disgust/insert-negative-reaction towards bash is rational or more… tribal, and why I decided to ask. It’s hard to shake away the feeling of “this shouldn’t just be me, right?”

Certainly so. The same applies to any languages we choose, no?

That’s definitely worth mentioning indeed. Bash variables, aside from arrays and hashmaps that you get with declare, are just strings. Any time you need to start capturing a group of data and do stuff with them, it’s a sign to move on. But there are many many times where that’s unnecessary.

I think I mentioned it, but inverse: The only data type I’m comfortable with in bash are simple string scalars; plus some simple integer handling I suppose. Once I have to think about stuff like "${foo[@]}" and the like I feel like I should’ve switched languages already.

Plus I rarely actually want arrays, it’s way more likely I want something in the shape of

@dataclass(frozen=True)
class Foo:
    # …

foos: set[Foo] = …

Always welcome a new shell. I’ve not heard of yash but I’ll check it out.

Any reason to use #!/bin/sh over #!/usr/bin/env sh?

This is almost a strawman argument.

You don’t have to shell out to a db cli. Most of them will gladly take some SQL and spit out some output. Now that output might be in some tabular format with some pretty borders around them that you have to deal with, if you are about the output within your script, but that’s your choice and so deal with it if it’s within your comfort zone to do so. Now if you don’t care about the output and just want it in some file, that’s pretty straightforward, and it’s not too different from just some cli that spits something out and you’ve redirected that output to a file.

I’ve mentioned in another comment where if you need to accept input and use that for your queries, psql is absolutely not the tool to use. If you can’t do it properly in bash and tools, just don’t. That’s fine.

With web API calls, same story really; you may not be all that concerned about the response. Calling a webhook? They’re designed to be a fire and forget, where we’re fine with losing failed connections. Some APIs don’t really follow strict rules with REST, and will gladly include an “ok” as a value in their response to tell you if a request was successful. If knowing that is important to the needs of the program, then, well, there you have it. Otherwise, there are still ways you can get the HTTP code and handle appropriately. If you need to do anything complex with the contents of the response, then you should probably look elsewhere.

My entire post is not to say that “you can do everything in bash and you should”. My point is that there are many cases where bash seems like a good sufficient tool to get that simple job done, and it can do it more easily with less boilerplate than, say, Python or Ruby.

That is definitely not something I would do… for work (totally not implying that I miiiight do it outside of work for shits and giggles :P).

I didn’t create this post trying to be like “y’all should just use Bash”, nor is it an attempt to say that I like Bash, but I guess that’s how people boil others down to these days. Fanatics only. Normalcy is dead. (I’m exaggerating ofc)

That’s my take on the use of bash too. If it’s something that people think it’s worth bring their pitchforks out for, then it’s something you should probably not write in bash.

I honestly don’t care about being right or wrong. Our trade focuses on what works and what doesn’t and what can make things work reliably as we maintain them, if we even need to maintain them. I’m not proposing for bash to replace our web servers. And I certainly am not proposing that we can abandon robustness. What I am suggesting that we think about here, is that when you do not really need that robustness, for something that may perhaps live in your production system outside of user paths, perhaps something that you, your team, and the stakeholders of the particular project understand that the solution is temporary in nature, why would Bash not be sufficient?

I suspect you just haven’t used Bash enough to hit some of the many many footguns.

Wrong assumption. I’ve been writing Bash for 5-6 years now.

Maybe it’s the way I’ve been structuring my code, or the problems I’ve been solving with it, in the last few years after using shellcheck and bash-language-server that I’ve not ran into issues where I get fucked over by quotes.

But I can assure you that I know when to dip and just use a “proper programming language” while thinking that Bash wouldn’t cut it. You seem to have an image of me just being a “bash glorifier”, and I’m not sure if it’ll convince you (and I would encourage you to read my other replies if you aren’t), but I certainly don’t think bash should be used for everything.

No. If it’s missing $1 will silently become an empty string. os.args[1] will throw an error. Much more robust.

You’ll probably hate this, but you can use set -u to catch unassigned variables. You should also use fallbacks wherever sensible.

Absolutely not. Python is strongly typed, and even statically typed if you want. Light years ahead of Bash’s mess. Quoting is pretty easy to get right in Python.

Not a good argument imo. It eliminates a good class of problems sure. But you can’t eliminate their dependence on shared libraries that many commands also use, and that’s what my point was about.

And I’m sure you can find a whole dictionary’s worth of cases where people shoot themselves in the foot with bash. I don’t deny that’s the case. Bash is not a good language where the programmer is guarded from shooting themselves in the foot as much as possible. The guardrails are loose, and it’s the script writer’s job to guard themselves against it. Is that good for an enterprise scenario, where you may either blow something up, drop a database table, lead to the lost of lives or jobs, etc? Absolutely not. Just want to copy some files around and maybe send it to an internal chat for regular reporting? I don’t see why not.

Bash is not your hammer to hit every possible nail out there. That’s not what I’m proposing at all.

Agreed.

Also gtfobins is a great resource in addition to shellcheck to try to make secure scripts.

For instance I felt upon a script like this recently:

#!/bin/bash
# ... some stuff ...
tar -caf archive.tar.bz2 "$@"

Quotes are OK, shellcheck is happy, but, according to gtfobins, you can abuse tar, so running the script like this: ./test.sh /dev/null --checkpoint=1 --checkpoint-action=exec=/bin/sh ends up spawning an interactive shell…

So you can add up binaries insanity on top of bash’s mess.

If you need anything that complex and that it’s critical for, say, customers, or people doing things directly for customers, you probably shouldn’t use bash. Anything that needs to grow? Definitely not bash. I’m not saying bash is what you should use if you want it to grow into, say, a web server, but that it’s good enough for small tasks that you don’t expect to grow in complexity.

To be fair, you don’t always have to use the [[ syntax. I know I don’t, e.g. if I’m just looking for a command that returns 1 or 0, which happens quite a bit if you get to use grep.

That said, man test is my friend.

But I’ve also gotten so used to using it that I remember -z and -n by heart :P

-e is great until there’s a command that you want to allow to fail in some scenario.

I know OP is talking about bash specifically but pipefail isn’t portable and I’m not always on a system with bash installed.