Neofetch is also written in bash: https://github.com/dylanaraps/neofetch/blob/master/neofetch
For my own work, I once wrote a functional file system based irc client in ~50 lines of bash: https://github.com/retrohacker/irc-sh/blob/master/main.sh
To learn bash:
Writing very simple scripts is certainly simple, but anything even a bit functionally more advanced (arrays, but even strings cycling or splitting is quirky) is a pain. Heck, even something as simple as process substitution is horribly unsafe (I wonder how many devs know how/why).
It's practically impossible to write correct Bash without shellcheck.
> It's practically impossible to write correct Bash without shellcheck.
I agree with this, since I've never seen a bash script, in the wild, that passed the important bits of shellcheck, without already being passed through spellcheck. I challenge anyone that thinks they've written good bash, with any significant level of complexity, to run that script through shellcheck. Each time I've done this, when starting at a new company, the response has usually been "Will not fix. That's why you don't use spaces in filenames/paths".
But it's not a developer's choice - Bash's syntax is cryptic itself. Here's a random sampling of common patterns:
Arrays:
- `${#myvar[@]}`: unreadable
- `mapfile myvar < <(grep pattern file)`: "mapfile" is not exactly a clear term (there's the synonym
"readarray", but "mapfile" is the reference; worse, you may find both used inconsistently); the
command as I wrote it also has two problems
- `${myvar##.*}`: unreadable
- `echo $(IFS=,; echo "${myvar[*]}")`: unreadable; most also don't know the difference between `[@]`
and `[\*]`; this doesn't also work for two-char join operations
- `[[ $myvar =~ $(echo '\bpattern\b') ]]`: unreadable, and most don't know why command substitution
is needed
- `3>&2 2>&1 1>&3`: most don't know what this means