Re:Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs
by afandian on Sunday June 28, 2026 @07:40AM
(#48706474)
I’ve been down this path (it was a script for scraping and extracting text). You write your text utility in bash. It works. Then you need a regex so you use sed.
Then you wonder why it doesn’t work in your other environment. Then you find that GNU vs BSD sed have different syntax.
Better to start with Python once you’re doing more than coordinating well known other tools.
Re:Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs
by StilesCrisis on Sunday June 28, 2026 @06:53AM
(#48706220)
Who's updating their blog from a random machine without Python on it, though?
Re:Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs
by Jhsto on Sunday June 28, 2026 @08:03AM
(#48706602)
I'd presume it's quite common with NixOS. At least I don't have python linked to my environment. It might be different would I use the REPL, but I do not, so for me python is a program (or script) dependency, not something I need to carry around. It's actually quite common for many setup scripts to fail when python is not installed, but not all of them list python as a dependency either.
Re:Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs
by PaulRobinson on Sunday June 28, 2026 @03:42PM
(#48710815)
It's not python that's the dependency that needs managing. It's pip and the keystone cops it brings along.
Re:Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs
by irishcoffee on Sunday June 28, 2026 @09:02AM
(#48706922)
To be fair, qualifying bash as on (almost) every system and then poo-pooing vi as being also on (almost) every system seems odd. Had you said sh instead of bash the analogy would have worked better.
Re:Bashblog – a single bash script to create blogs
by PaulRobinson on Monday June 29, 2026 @06:54AM
(#48717544)
True, I'll take that. I haven't been on a machine without bash in ~25 years though, but I have been on machines without vi. But yeah, from a "what can I expect from a POSIX-like environment bare-bones minimum install" perspective, you're right.
I remember somebody once telling me that they had learned vi because "it was always installed". Well, no, technically, the only editor you can be sure is there is ed. So, you know, learn that. I was surprised that they actually did.
Bash is syntactically not perfect, I agree. However it's a well known, mature, stable environment. LLMs can write it well if you need them to. If it was perfect, we'd never have had Perl, and as a result we'd never have had Ruby, Python and other scripting languages.
But I like it's a tool that doesn't require me to go reach for a package manager and some build tools I don't always have on every system.