Cheating at a company group activity using Unix tools

Re:Cheating at a company group activity using Unix tools by flohofwoe on Monday December 13, 2021 @05:53AM (#29538469)

Fundamentally it's the same thing. The UNIX tools are the "batteries included" standard library of the integrated shell programming environment. And if you need to extend that library you quickly whip up a new minimal command line tool in C (or any other language which allows to write small and quick and dirty command line tools, like Python).

The only downside of shell scripting is that it isn't trivially portable to Windows (or even macOS because of the differences between GNU and BSD tools), so it often makes sense to create big Python scripts that do more than "one thing right". If the whole world would run on UNIX, shell scripting would make much more sense.

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Re:Cheating at a company group activity using Unix tools by actually_a_dog on Monday December 13, 2021 @12:13PM (#29541653)

> The only downside of shell scripting is....

The only downside? Let's add that no major *NIX shell that I'm aware of has any good way to modularize code while enforcing encapsulation of state.

At my previous job, we had a rule that any shell script longer than about a page of code had to be replaced with a Python script ASAP. That was a good rule, IMO, because once you've exceeded a certain size, a shell script starts getting brittle and hard to work with. I don't know if 1 page of code is the threshold size or not, but it seems like as good a cutoff as any.

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