Shell Script Best Practices, from a decade of scripting things

Re:Shell Script Best Practices, from a decade of scripting t... by humanrebar on Thursday October 27, 2022 @08:56AM (#33356775)

For simple scripting tasks, yes. I have had the opposite experience for more critical software engineering tasks (as in, coding integrated over time and people).

Language aside, the ecosystem and culture do not afford enough in way of testing, dependency management, feature flags, static analysis, legibility, and so on. The reason people say to keep shell programs short is because of these problems, it needs to be possible to rewrite shell programs on a whim. At least then, you can A/B test and deploy at that scope.

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Re:Shell Script Best Practices, from a decade of scripting t... by sargstuff on Friday October 28, 2022 @11:15AM (#33372431)

awk great for things that will be used over several decades. (where hardware / OS started with nolonger exists at end of multi-decade project, but data from start to end still has to be used)

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