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?

  • Die4Ever@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    42
    ·
    1 month ago

    I just don’t think bash is good for maintaining the code, debugging, growing the code over time, adding automated tests, or exception handling

    • Badland9085OP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      9
      ·
      1 month ago

      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.

      • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        24
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        it’s (bash) good enough for small tasks that you don’t expect to grow in complexity.

        I don’t think you’ll get a lot of disagreement on that, here. As mention elsewhere, my team prefers bash for simple use cases (and as their bash-hating boss, I support and agree with how and when they use bash.)

        But a bunch of us draw the line at database access.

        Any database is going to throw a lot of weird shit at the bash script.

        So, to me, a bash script has grown to unacceptable complexity on the first day that it accesses a database.

        • Grtz78@feddit.org
          link
          fedilink
          Deutsch
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          1 month ago

          We have dozens of bash scripts running table cleanups and maintenece tasks on the db. In the last 20 years these scripts where more stable than the database itself (oracle -> mysql -> postgres).

          But in all fairness they just call the cliclient with the appropiate sql and check for the response code, generating a trap.

          • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            edit-2
            1 month ago

            That’s a great point.

            I post long enough responses already, so I didn’t want to get into resilience planning, but your example is a great highlight that there’s rarely hard and fast rules about what will work.

            There certainly are use cases for bash calling database code that make sense.

            I don’t actually worry much when it’s something where the first response to any issue is to run it again in 15 minutes.

            It’s cases where we might need to do forensic analysis that bash plus SQL has caused me headaches.

            • Grtz78@feddit.org
              link
              fedilink
              Deutsch
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 month ago

              Yeah, if it feels like a transaction would be helpful, at least go for pl/sql and save yourself some pain. Bash is for system maintenance, not for business logic.

              Heck, I wrote a whole monitoring system for a telephony switch with nothing more than bash and awk and it worked better than the shit from the manufacturer, including writing to the isdn cards for mobile messaging. But I wouldn’t do that again if I have an alternative.

              • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                2
                ·
                1 month ago

                Bash is for system maintenance, not for business logic.

                That is such a good guiding principle. I’m gonna borrow that.

      • EfreetSK@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        9
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        small tasks that you don’t expect to grow in complexity

        On one conference I heard saying: “There is no such thing as temporary solution and there is no such thing as proof of concept”. It’s an overexaguration of course but it has some truth to it - there’s a high chance that your “small change” or PoC will be used for the next 20 years so write it as robust and resilient as possible and document it. In other words everything will be extended, everything will be maintained, everything will change hands.

        So to your point - is bash production ready? Well, depends. Do you have it in git? Is it part of some automation pipeline? Is it properly documented? Do you by chance have some tests for it? Then yes, it’s production ready.

        If you just “write this quick script and run it in cron” then no. Because in 10 years people will pull their hair screaming “what the hell is hapenning?!”

        Edit: or worse, they’ll scream it during the next incident that’ll happen at 2 AM on Sunday

        • Badland9085OP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          2
          ·
          1 month ago

          I find it disingenuous to blame it on the choice of bash being bad when goalposts are moved. Solutions can be temporary as long as goalposts aren’t being moved. Once the goalpost is moved, you have to re-evaluate whether your solution is still sufficient to meet new needs. If literally everything under the sun and out of it needs to be written in a robust manner to accommodate moving goalposts, by that definition, nothing will ever be sufficient, unless, well, we’ve come to a point where a human request by words can immediately be compiled into machine instructions to do exactly what they’ve asked for, without loss of intention.

          That said, as engineers, I believe it’s our responsibility to identify and highlight severe failure cases given a solution and its management, and it is up to the stakeholders to accept those risks. If you need something running at 2am in the morning, and a failure of that process would require human intervention, then maybe you should consider not running it at 2am, or pick a language with more guardrails.

  • jollyroberts@jolly-piefed.jomandoa.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    40
    ·
    1 month ago

    “Use the best tool for the job, that the person doing the job is best at.” That’s my approach.

    I will use bash or python dart or whatever the project uses.

  • vext01@lemmy.sdf.org
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    27
    ·
    1 month ago

    Honestly, if a script grows to more than a few tens of lines I’m off to a different scripting language because I’ve written enough shell script to know that it’s hard to get right.

    Shellcheck is great, but what’s greater is a language that doesn’t have as many gotchas from the get go.

  • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    26
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    1 month ago

    I’m afraid your colleagues are completely right and you are wrong, but it sounds like you genuinely are curious so I’ll try to answer.

    I think the fundamental thing you’re forgetting is robustness. Yes Bash is convenient for making something that works once, in the same way that duct tape is convenient for fixes that work for a bit. But for production use you want something reliable and robust that is going to work all the time.

    I suspect you just haven’t used Bash enough to hit some of the many many footguns. Or maybe when you did hit them you thought “oops I made a mistake”, rather than “this is dumb; I wouldn’t have had this issue in a proper programming language”.

    The main footguns are:

    1. Quoting. Trust me you’ve got this wrong even with shellcheck. I have too. That’s not a criticism. It’s basically impossible to get quoting completely right in any vaguely complex Bash script.
    2. Error handling. Sure you can set -e, but then that breaks pipelines and conditionals, and you end up with really monstrous pipelines full of pipefail noise. It’s also extremely easy to forget set -e.
    3. General robustness. Bash silently does the wrong thing a lot.

    instead of a import os; os.args[1] in Python, you just do $1

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

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

    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.

    I actually started keeping a list of bugs at work that were caused directly by people using Bash. I’ll dig it out tomorrow and give you some real world examples.

    • JamonBear@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 month ago

      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.

      • esa@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        30 days ago

        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…

        This runs into a part of the unix philosophy about doing one thing and doing it well: Extending programs to have more (absolutely useful) functionality winds up becoming a security risk. The shell is generally geared towards being a collection of shortcuts rather than a normal, predictable but tedious API.

        For a script like that you’d generally want to validate that the input is actually what you expect if it needs to handle hostile users, though. It’ll likely help the sleepy users too.

      • lurklurk@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        30 days ago

        I imagine adding -- so it becomes tar -caf archive.tar.bz2 -- "$@" would fix that specific case

        But yeah, putting bash in a position where it has more rights than the user providing the input is a really bad idea

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        gtfobins

        Meh, most in that list are just “if it has the SUID bit set, it can be used to break out of your security context”.

    • lurklurk@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      30 days ago

      I don’t disagree with your point, but how does set -e break conditionals? I use it all the time without issues

      Pipefail I don’t use as much so perhaps that’s the issue?

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        29 days ago

        It means that all commands that return a non-zero exit code will fail the script. The problem is that exit codes are a bit overloaded and sometimes non-zero values don’t indicate failure, they indicate some kind of status. For example in git diff --exit-code or grep.

        I think I was actually thinking of pipefail though. If you don’t set it then errors in pipelines are ignored, which is obviously bad. If you do then you can’t use grep in pipelines.

        • lurklurk@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          29 days ago

          My sweet spot is set -ue because I like to be able to use things like if grep -q ...; then and I like things to stop if I misspelled a variable.

          It does hide failures in the middle of a pipeline, but it’s a tradeoff. I guess one could turn it on and off when needed

    • Badland9085OP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      2
      ·
      1 month ago

      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.

      • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        And I certainly am not proposing that we can abandon robustness.

        If you’re proposing Bash, then yes you are.

        You’ll probably hate this, but you can use set -u to catch unassigned variables.

        I actually didn’t know that, thanks for the hint! I am forced to use Bash occasionally due to misguided coworkers so this will help at least.

        But you can’t eliminate their dependence on shared libraries that many commands also use, and that’s what my point was about.

        Not sure what you mean here?

        Just want to copy some files around and maybe send it to an internal chat for regular reporting? I don’t see why not.

        Well if it’s just for a temporary hack and it doesn’t matter if it breaks then it’s probably fine. Not really what is implied by “production” though.

        Also even in that situation I wouldn’t use it for two reasons:

        1. “Temporary small script” tends to smoothly morph into “10k line monstrosity that the entire system depends on” with no chance for rewrites. It’s best to start in a language that can cope with it.
        2. It isn’t really any nicer to use Bash over something like Deno. Like… I don’t know why you ever would, given the choice. When you take bug fixing into account Bash is going to be slower and more painful.
        • Badland9085OP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          arrow-down
          4
          ·
          1 month ago

          I’m going to downvote your comment based on that first quote reply, because I think that’s an extreme take that’s unwarranted. You’ve essentially dissed people who use it for CI/CD and suggested that their pipeline is not robust because of their choice of using Bash at all.

          And judging by your second comment, I can see that you have very strong opinions against bash for reasons that I don’t find convincing, other than what seems to me like irrational hatred from being rather uninformed. It’s fine being uninformed, but I suggest you tame your opinions and expectations with that.

          About shared libraries, many popular languages, Python being a pretty good example, do rely on these to get performance that would be really hard to get from their own interpreters / compilers, or if re-implementing it in the language would be pretty pointless given the existence of a shared library, which would be much better scrutinized, is audited, and is battle-tested. libcrypto is one example. Pandas depends on NumPy, which depends on, I believe, libblas and liblapack, both written in C, and I think one if not both of these offer a cli to get answers as well. libssh is depended upon by many programming languages with an ssh library (though there are also people who choose to implement their own libssh in their language of choice). Any vulnerabilities found in these shared libraries would affect all libraries that depend on them, regardless of the programming language you use.

          If production only implies systems in a user’s path and not anything else about production data, then sure, my example is not production. That said though, I wouldn’t use bash for anything that’s in a user’s path. Those need to stay around, possible change frequently, and not go down. Bash is not your language for that and that’s fine. You’re attacking a strawman that you’ve constructed here though.

          If your temporary small script morphs into a monster and you’re still using bash, bash isn’t at fault. You and your team are. You’ve all failed to anticipate that change and misunderstood the “temporary” nature of your script, and allowed your “temporary thing” to become permanent. That’s a management issue, not a language choice. You’ve moved that goalpost and failed to change your strategy to hit that goal.

          You could use Deno, but then my point stands. You have to write a function to handle the case where an env var isn’t provided, that’s boilerplate. You have to get a library for, say, accessing contents in Azure or AWS, set that up, figure out how that api works, etc, while you could already do that with the awscli and probably already did it to check if you could get what you want. What’s the syntax for mkdir? What’s it for mkdir -p? What about other options? If you already use the terminal frequently, some of these are your basic bread and butter and you know them probably by heart. Unless you start doing that with Deno, you won’t reach the level of familiarity you can get with the shell (whichever shell you use ofc).

          And many argue against bash with regards to error handling. You don’t always need something that proper language has. You don’t always need to handle every possible error state differently, assuming you have multiple. Did it fail? Can you tolerate that failure? Yup? Good. No? Can you do something else to get what you want or make it tolerable? Yes? Good. No? Maybe you don’t want to use bash then.

          • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            arrow-down
            1
            ·
            29 days ago

            You’ve essentially dissed people who use it for CI/CD and suggested that their pipeline is not robust because of their choice of using Bash at all.

            Yes, because that is precisely the case. It’s not a personal attack, it’s just a fact that Bash is not robust.

            You’re trying to argue that your cardboard bridge is perfectly robust and then getting offended that I don’t think you should let people drive over it.

            About shared libraries, many popular languages, Python being a pretty good example, do rely on these to get performance that would be really hard to get from their own interpreters / compilers, or if re-implementing it in the language would be pretty pointless given the existence of a shared library, which would be much better scrutinized, is audited, and is battle-tested. libcrypto is one example. Pandas depends on NumPy, which depends on, I believe, libblas and liblapack, both written in C, and I think one if not both of these offer a cli to get answers as well. libssh is depended upon by many programming languages with an ssh library (though there are also people who choose to implement their own libssh in their language of choice). Any vulnerabilities found in these shared libraries would affect all libraries that depend on them, regardless of the programming language you use.

            You mean “third party libraries” not “shared libraries”. But anyway, so what? I don’t see what that has to do with this conversation. Do your Bash scripts not use third party code? You can’t do a lot with pure Bash.

            If your temporary small script morphs into a monster and you’re still using bash, bash isn’t at fault. You and your team are.

            Well that’s why I don’t use Bash. I’m not blaming it for existing, I’m just saying it’s shit so I don’t use it.

            You could use Deno, but then my point stands. You have to write a function to handle the case where an env var isn’t provided, that’s boilerplate.

            Handling errors correctly is slightly more code (“boilerplate”) than letting everything break when something unexpected happens. I hope you aren’t trying to use that as a reason not to handle errors properly. In any case the extra boilerplate is… Deno.env.get("FOO"). Wow.

            What’s the syntax for mkdir? What’s it for mkdir -p? What about other options?

            await Deno.mkdir("foo");
            await Deno.mkdir("foo", { recursive: true });
            

            What’s the syntax for a dictionary in Bash? What about a list of lists of strings?

  • ShawiniganHandshake@sh.itjust.works
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    23
    ·
    1 month ago

    I’ve worked in bash. I’ve written tools in bash that ended up having a significant lifetime.

    Personally, you lost me at

    reading from the database

    Database drivers exist for a reason. Shelling out to a database cli interface is full of potential pitfalls that don’t exist in any language with a programmatic interface to the database. Dealing with query parameterization in bash sounds un-fun and that’s table stakes, security-wise.

    Same with making web API calls. Error handling in particular is going to require a lot of boilerplate code that you would get mostly for free in languages like Python or Ruby or Go, especially if there’s an existing library that wraps the API you want to use in native language constructs.

    • Badland9085OP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      1 month ago

      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.

      • monk@lemmy.unboiled.info
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        23 days ago

        You can do everything in bash with things not written in bash, and the parts not written in bash would be alright.

  • zygo_histo_morpheus@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    18
    ·
    1 month ago

    One thing that I don’t think anyone else has mentioned is data structures. Bash does have arrays and hashmaps at least but I’ve found that working with them is significantly more awkward than in e.g. python. This is one of several reasons for why bash doesn’t scale up well, but sure for small enough scripts it can be fine (if you don’t care about windows)

    • esa@discuss.tchncs.de
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      7
      ·
      1 month ago

      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] = …
      
      • lurklurk@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        30 days ago

        I use the same heuristic… if I need a hashmap or more complex math, I need a different language

        Also if the script grows beyond 100 lines, I stop and think about what I’m doing. Sometimes it’s OK, but it’s a warning flag

        • esa@discuss.tchncs.de
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          30 days ago

          Yeah agreed on the 100 lines, or some other heuristic in the direction of “this script will likely continue to grow in complexity and I should switch to a language that’s better suited to handle that complexity”.

    • Badland9085OP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      ·
      1 month ago

      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.

  • melezhik@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    We are not taking about use of Bash in dev vs use Bash in production. This is imho incorrect question that skirts around the real problem in software development. We talk about use of Bash for simple enough tasks where code is rarely changed ( if not written once and thrown away ) and where every primitive language or DSL is ok, where when it comes to building of medium or complex size software systems where decomposition, complex data structures support, unit tests, error handling, concurrency, etc is a big of a deal - Bash really sucks because it does not allow one to deal with scaling challenges, by scaling I mean where you need rapidly change huge code base according changes of requirements and still maintain good quality of entire code. Bash is just not designed for that.

    • Badland9085OP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 month ago

      But not everything needs to scale, at least, if you don’t buy into the doctrine that everything has to be designed and written to live forever. If robust, scalable solutions is the nature of your work and there’s nothing else that can exist, then yeah, Bash likely have no place in that world. If you need any kind of handling more complicated than just getting an error and doing something else, then Bash is not it.

      Just because Bash isn’t designed for something you want to do, doesn’t mean it sucks. It’s just not the right tool. Just because you don’t practice law, doesn’t mean you suck; you just don’t do law. You can say that you suck at law though.

        • Badland9085OP
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          30 days ago

          You’re speaking prophetically there and I simply do not agree with that prophecy.

          If you and your team think you need to extend that bash script to do more, stop and consider writing it in some other languages. You’ve move the goalpost, so don’t expect that you can just build on your previous strategy and that it’ll work.

          If your “problem” stems from “well your colleagues will not likely be able to read or write bash well enough”, well then just don’t write it in bash.

      • melezhik@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        5
        ·
        edit-2
        30 days ago

        Yep. Like said - “We talk about use of Bash for simple enough tasks … where every primitive language or DSL is ok”, so Bash does not suck in general and I myself use it a lot in proper domains, but I just do not use it for tasks / domains with complexity ( in all senses, including, but not limited to team work ) growing over time …

  • esa@discuss.tchncs.de
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    13
    ·
    1 month ago

    At the level you’re describing it’s fine. Preferably use shellcheck and set -euo pipefail to make it more normal.

    But once I have any of:

    • nested control structures, or
    • multiple functions, or
    • have to think about handling anything else than simple strings that other programs manipulate (including thinking about bash arrays or IFS), or
    • bash scoping,
    • producing my own formatted logs at different log levels,

    I’m on to Python or something else. It’s better to get off bash before you have to juggle complexity in it.

    • vext01@lemmy.sdf.org
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 month ago

      -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.

      • esa@discuss.tchncs.de
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

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

        Yeah, I sometimes do

        set +e
        do_stuff
        set -e
        

        It’s sort of the bash equivalent of a

        try { 
          do_stuff()
        } 
        catch { 
          /* intentionally bare catch for any exception and error */
          /* usually a noop, but you could try some stuff with if and $? */ 
        }
        

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

        Yeah, I’m happy I don’t really have to deal with that. My worst-case is having to ship to some developer machines running macos which has bash from the stone ages, but I can still do stuff like rely on [[ rather than have to deal with [ . I don’t have a particular fondness for using bash as anything but a sort of config file (with export SETTING1=... etc) and some light handling of other applications, but I have even less fondness for POSIX sh. At that point I’m liable to rewrite it in Python, or if that’s not availaible in a user-friendly manner either, build a small static binary.

  • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    A few responses for you:

    • I deeply despise bash (edit: this was hyperbole. I also deeply appreciate bash, as is appropriate for something that has made my life better for free!). That Linux shell defaults settled on it is an embarrassment to the entire open source community. (Edit: but Lexers and Parsers are hard! You don’t see me fixing it, so yes, I’ll give it a break. I still have to be discerning for production use, of course.)
    • Yes, Bash is good enough for production. It is the world’s current default shell. As long as we avoid it’s fancier features (which all suck for production use), a quick bash script is often the most reasonable choice.
    • For the love of all that is holy, put your own personal phone number and no one else’s in the script, if you choose to use bash to access a datatbase. There’s thousands of routine ways that database access can hiccup, and bash is suitable to help you diagnose approximately 0% of them.
    • If I found out a colleague had used bash for database access in a context that I would be expected to co-maintain, I would start by plotting their demise, and then talk myself down to having a severe conversation with them - after I changed it immediately to something else, in production, ignoring all change protocols. (Invoking emergency change protocols.)

    Edit: I can’t even respond to the security concerns aspect of this. Choice of security tool affects the quality of protection. In this unfortunate analogy, Bash is “the pull out method”. Don’t do that anywhere that it matters, or anywhere that one can be fired for security violations.

    (Edit 2: Others have mentioned invoking SQL DB cleanup scripts from bash. I have no problem with that. Letting bash or cron tell the DB and a static bit of SQL to do their usual thing has been fine for me, as well. The nightmare scenario I was imagining was bash gathering various inputs to the SQL and then invoking them. I’ve had that pattern blow up in my face, and had a devil of a time putting together what went wrong. It also comes with security concerns, as bash is normally a completely trusted running environment, and database input often come from untrusted sources.)

      • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        7
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        I actually (also) love bash, and use it like crazy.

        What I really hate is that bash is so locked in legacy that it’s bad features (on a scripting language scale, which isn’t fair) (and of which there are too many to enumerate) are now locked in permanently.

        I also hate how convention has kept other shells from replacing bash’s worst features with better modern alternatives.

        To some extent, I’m railing against how hard it is to write a good Lexer and a Parser, honestly. Now that bash is stable, there’s little interest in improving it. Particularly since one can just invoke a better scripting language for complex work.

        I mourn the sweet spot that Perl occupies, that Bash and Python sit on either side of, looking longingly across the gap that separated their practical use cases.

        I have lost hope that Python will achieve shell script levels of pragmatism. Although the invoke library is a frigging cool attempt.

        But I hold on to my sorrow and anger that Ba