Shelling Out Sucks (2012)

Re:Shelling Out Sucks (2012) by pixelbeat on Tuesday May 12, 2015 @09:35AM (#9531609)

There are large advantages to shelling out though.

1. Not reinventing the wheel

2. Implicit use of multiple cores

Things could be improved I agree.

For example posix_spawn() could be efficiently implemented on glibc to avoid kernel overhead for fork()+exec() from large processes. Then language runtimes could use that to implement their "shell out" routines.

Also pipefail doesn't cater for SIGPIPE as detailed at http://www.pixelbeat.org/programming/sigpipe_handling.html which can be awkward.

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Re:Shelling Out Sucks (2012) by StefanKarpinski on Tuesday May 12, 2015 @12:11PM (#9532759)

These are advantages of calling external programs, not of shelling out – which specifically entails using a shell as an intermediary to call an external program. All of the pitfalls in this blog post are due to using the shell, not to calling other programs. If you avoid the shell, then you avoid these issues.

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