I really like bash when dealing with even somewhat advanced scripting. Like the 300 LOC scraper I have written over the past two days which horribly parses HTML files using grep | sed.
It’s genuinely so much more fun to do this with Bash than, say, Python. I have once written a scraper using Beautifulsoup and I have no desire to do so ever again.
Honestly, only Haskell manages to beat Bash in how satisfying it feels when you manage to get something working well.
Bash has its upsides too, like the fact that it has arrays / lists and dictionaries / hashmaps. In my opinion, it gets iffy though when you need to do stuff with IFS; at that point one might be better off just using specialized tools.
Not saying working bash isn’t good enough, but it can break in very surprising ways is my experience.
I really like bash when dealing with even somewhat advanced scripting. Like the 300 LOC scraper I have written over the past two days which horribly parses HTML files using grep | sed.
It’s genuinely so much more fun to do this with Bash than, say, Python. I have once written a scraper using Beautifulsoup and I have no desire to do so ever again.
Honestly, only Haskell manages to beat Bash in how satisfying it feels when you manage to get something working well.
Bash has its upsides too, like the fact that it has arrays / lists and dictionaries / hashmaps. In my opinion, it gets iffy though when you need to do stuff with IFS; at that point one might be better off just using specialized tools.
Not saying working bash isn’t good enough, but it can break in very surprising ways is my experience.