IMO, that's not where the inscrutability comes from. Rather, it is things like many useful (and thus used) constructs being implemented with line noise like `"$(foo)"`, `2>&1 &`, `${foo:-bar}`, etc., finicky control flow syntax, surprising defaults that can be changed within unclear scopes, etc.

You're right, but you can also expand these. If not syntactically, by adding temporary variables and comments around these complex parts.

It's true that Bash and Perl has one of the most contractible syntax around, but it's not impossible to make it more understandable.

However, these parts of codebases are considered "supportive" and treated as second class citizens, and never receives the same love core parts of the codebases enjoy. That's a big mistake IMO.

When you make something more readable all around, hiding things becomes harder exponentially.

I have seen people write bash scripts with a lot of love and attention trying really hard to pay attention to modern best practices and avoiding known pitfalls and using shellcheck. It still looked like shit imo.

I challenge you to find a single easily readable >100 line bash script and link it here (I do think small scripts can be fine).

While not completely up to my own standards, this is pretty neat and readable: https://rclone.org/install.sh

I may add more if I have time today.

Must say I'm pleasantly surprised.

Yep, my experience of this was at google, where I heard "gbash is actually pretty good!", so I learned that system well (because shell scripts are incredibly useful!), but still found the results unsatisfyingly inscrutable.

The irony of talking about readability of an example of curl to sh. You really don't need to understand the flags here to understand that this is a voluntary RCE and while I'm generally for long options in scripts, in this case it might make it harder to see the real problem because it increases the distance between the download command and the shell invocation.

> The irony of talking about readability of an example of curl to sh.

Who says I blindly curl2sh these scripts? I download them, read them and understand what they do before running them actually.

Long options make obscure command lines readable and understandable, actually, and if you vet them, you understand what they are doing.

Short options make things harder because I need to open the man of the command to understand what it is doing.

You don't have to do everything blindly as the quick start documents outline.