this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025

85 points (97.8% liked)

Programming

17917 readers

131 users here now

Welcome to the main community in programming.dev! Feel free to post anything relating to programming here!

Cross posting is strongly encouraged in the instance. If you feel your post or another person's post makes sense in another community cross post into it.

Hope you enjoy the instance!

Rules

Follow the programming.dev instance rules
Keep content related to programming in some way
If you're posting long videos try to add in some form of tldr for those who don't want to watch videos

Wormhole

Follow the wormhole through a path of communities !webdev@programming.dev

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

snowe@programming.dev

Ategon@programming.dev

MaungaHikoi

Am I crazy in thinking that bash is good enough for production? (lemm.ee)

submitted 1 week ago by Badland9085@lemm.ee to c/programming@programming.dev

133 comments fedilink hide all child comments

This may make some people pull their hair out, but I’d love to hear some arguments. I’ve had the impression that people really don’t like bash, not from here, but just from people I’ve worked with.

There was a task at work where we wanted something that’ll run on a regular basis, and doesn’t do anything complex aside from reading from the database and sending the output to some web API. Pretty common these days.

I can’t think of a simpler scripting language to use than bash. Here are my reasons:

Reading from the environment is easy, and so is falling back to some value; just do ${VAR:-fallback}; no need to write another if-statement to check for nullity. Wanna check if a variable’s set to something expected? if [[ <test goes here> ]]; then <handle>; fi
Reading from arguments is also straightforward; instead of a import os; os.args[1] in Python, you just do $1.
Sending a file via HTTP as part of an application/x-www-form-urlencoded request is super easy with curl. In most programming languages, you’d have to manually open the file, read them into bytes, before putting it into your request for the http library that you need to import. curl already does all that.
Need to read from a curl response and it’s JSON? Reach for jq.
Instead of having to set up a connection object/instance to your database, give sqlite, psql, duckdb or whichever cli db client a connection string with your query and be on your way.
Shipping is… fairly easy? Especially if docker is common in your infrastructure. Pull Ubuntu or debian or alpine, install your dependencies through the package manager, and you’re good to go. If you stay within Linux and don’t have to deal with differences in bash and core utilities between different OSes (looking at you macOS), and assuming you tried to not to do anything too crazy and bring in necessary dependencies in the form of calling them, it should be fairly portable.

Sure, there can be security vulnerability concerns, but you’d still have to deal with the same problems with your Pythons your Rubies etc.

For most bash gotchas, shellcheck does a great job at warning you about them, and telling how to address those gotchas.

There are probably a bunch of other considerations but I can’t think of them off the top of my head, but I’ve addressed a bunch before.

So what’s the dealeo? What am I missing that may not actually be addressable?

(page 2) 50 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] friend_of_satan@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago

Dude, pihole is bash.

https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/master/pihole

[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Well then you guys will love what this guy (by tha name "icitry") did with bash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_WGoPaNPMY

He created a youtube clone with Bash

[–] Badland9085@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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)

[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

Basically, If you are crazy enough, you csn make anything with any language Hence, me sharing the video

[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago (3 children)

May I introduce you to rust script? Basically a wrapper to run rust scripts right from the command line. They can access the rust stdlib, crates, and so on, plus do error handling and much more.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago (3 children)

Yeah, sometimes I'll use that just to have the sane control flow of Rust, while still performing most tasks via commands.

You can throw down a function like this to reduce the boilerplate for calling commands:

fn run(command: &str) {
    let status = Command::new("sh")
        .arg("-c")
        .arg(command)
        .status()
        .unwrap();
    assert!(status.success());
}

Then you can just write run("echo 'hello world' > test.txt"); to run your command.

load more comments (3 replies)

[–] Badland9085@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago (5 children)

How easily can you start parsing arguments and read env vars? Do people import clap and such to provide support for those sorts of needs?

load more comments (5 replies)

load more comments (1 replies)

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (6 children)

Run checkbashisms over your $PATH (grep for #!/bin/sh). That's the problem with Bash.
#!/bin/sh is for POSIX compliant shell scripts only, use #!/bin/bash if you use bash syntax.

Btw, i quite like yash.

[–] Badland9085@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

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

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] thirteene@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Pretty much all languages are middleware, and most of the original code was shell/bash. All new employees in platform/devops want to immediately push their preferred language, they want java and rust environments. It's a pretty safe bet if they insist on using a specific language; then they don't know how awk or sed. Bash has all the tools you need, but good developers understand you write libraries for functionality that's missing. Modern languages like Python have been widely adopted and has a friendlier onboarding and will save you time though.

Saw this guy's post in another thread, he's strawmanning because of lack of knowledge.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 2 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Pretty much all languages are middleware, and most of the original code was shell/bash.

What? I genuinely do not know what you mean by this.

load more comments (5 replies)

[–] NostraDavid@programming.dev 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Can I slap a decorator on a Bash function? I love my @retry(...) (via tenacity, even if it's a bit wordy).

[–] Badland9085@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago

I’m going to read this with a big “/s” at the end there xD

load more comments