Re:Use long flags when scripting
by YokoZar on Monday February 04, 2013 @06:42PM
(#5168035)
These days I think it's clear that the dominant use case for shell scripts is not a full time responsibility but rather edge work for deploying/installing code written in other languages. Most people looking at shell code aren't going to be shell masters, they're going to be engineers of more modern things that have to look at the shell script for some reason.
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> ...they're going to be engineers of more modern things...
Have you read TAOUP? The entire Unix philosophy hinges around the shell, since the shell is the tool that lets you glue different pieces together. The shell is not outdated.
If you live entirely within one language ecosystem, then you may be tempted to consider the shell an afterthought, and make all services available via API calls instead. But this is inefficient, slows down development, reduces flexibility and limits the capabilities of your programs. This fallacy is old and certainly is not "modern". See TAOUP for details; it explains this far better than I ever could.
But a lot of the defaults in the bourne shell and various posix utilities are wrong. One example: space as a field separator is clearly the wrong default, since it's nearly impossible to not find file-names with spaces in them these days.