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I have a confession to make: Unless shell script is absolutely required, I just use Python for all my automation needs.
Ever since I switched to Fish Shell, I’ve had no issues remembering anything. Ported my entire catalogue of custom scripts over to fish and everything became much cleaner. More legible, and less code to accomplish the same things. Easier argument parsing, control structures, everything. Much less error prone IMO.
Highly recommend it. It’s obviously not POSIX or anything, but I find that the cost of installing fish on every machine I own is lower than maintaining POSIX-compliant scripts.
Enjoy your scripting!
If you’re going to write scripts that requires installing software, might as well use something like python though? Most Linux distros ship also ship with python installed
A shell script can be much more agile, potent, and concise, depending on the use case.
E.g. if you want to make a facade (wrapper) around a program, that’s much cleaner in
$SHELL. All you’re doing is checking which keyword/command the user wanted, and then executing the commands associated with what you want to achieve, like maybe displaying a notification and updating a global environment variable or something.Executing a bunch of commands and chaining their output together in python is surely much more cumbersome than just typing them out next to each other separated by a pipe character. It’s higher-level. 👍
If it’s just text in text out though, sure, mostly equivalent, but for me this is rarely the use case for a script.
I’m not anti bash or fish, I’ve written in both just this week, but if we’re talking about readability/syntax as this post is about, and you want an alternative to bash, I’d say python is a more natural alternative. Fish syntax is still fairly ugly compared to most programming languages in my opinion.
Different strokes for different folks I suppose.
Fish syntax is still fairly ugly compared to most programming languages in my opinion.
subprocess.run(["fd", "-t", "d", "some_query"])vs
fd -t d some_queryWhich is cleaner? Not to mention if you want to take the output from the command and pipe it into another one.
It’s not about folks with weird opinions or otherwise, it’s about use cases. 🙂 I don’t think python is any more “natural” than most other imperative languages.
Fish is probably even more natural, actually, due to it being more high level and the legibility of the script is basically dependent on the naming of the commands and options and variables used within it, rather than something else, just like python. They probably have similarly legible keywords. Fish I imagine has fewer, which is a good thing for legibility. A script does a lot more with a lot less, due to the commands themselves doing so much behind the scenes. There’s a lot more boilerplate to a “proper” programming language than a scripting language.
But if you want to do something that python is better suited for, like advanced data processing or number crunching, or writing a whole application, then I would say that would be the better choice. It’s not about preference for me when it comes to python vs fish, it’s about the right tool for the job. But if we’re talking about bash vs fish, then I’m picking fish purely by preference. 👍
I love fish but sadly it has no proper equivalent of
set -eas far as I know.; or return;in every line is not a solution.I wish I could but since I use bash at work (often on embedded systems so no custom scripts or anything that isn’t source code) I just don’t want to go back and forth between the two.
Yeah, using one tool and then another one can be confusing at times. 😅
It’s the default on CachyOS and I’ve been enjoying it. I typically use zsh.
Yeah I also went bash -> zsh -> fish. Zsh was just too complicated to configure for my taste. Couldn’t do it, apart from copy pasting stuff I didn’t understand myself, and that just didn’t sit right.
I’ve been meaning to check out
fish. Thanks for the reminder!Happy adventuring! ✨
I switched to fish a while back, but haven’t learned how to script in it yet. Sounds like I should learn
Give it a shot after reading through the manual! (Extremely short compared to bash’s!) It’s a joy in my opinion. ☺️👌
I still have to look up the exact syntax of ifs and whiles.
I’ve coded in bash for a while
Bash was the first language I learned, got pretty decent at it. Now what happens is I think of a tiny script I need to write, I start writing it in Bash, I have to do string manipulation, I say fuck this shit and rewrite in Python lol
Unironically love powershell
For a defacto windows admin my Powershell skills are…embarrassing lol but I’m getting there!
And I thought I was the only one… for smaller bash scripts chatGPT/Deepseek does a good enough job at it. Though I still haven’t tried VScode’s copilot on bash scripts. I have only tried it wirh C code and it kiiiinda did an ass job at helping…
AI does decently enough on scripting languages if you spell it out enough for it lol, but IMO it tends to not do so well when it comes to compiled languages
I’ve tried Python with VScode Copilot (Claude) and it did pretty good
That’s because scripted languages are more forgiving in general.
I was chalking it up to some scripting languages just tending to be more popular (like python) and thus having more training data for them to draw from
But that’s a good point too lol
Both can be true, Python does have a lot of examples floating online.
Yeah I tried that, Claude with some C code. Unfortunately the Ai only took me from point A to point A. And it only took a few hours :D
i used powershell, and even after trying every other shell and as a die hard Linux user I’ve considered going back to powershell cause damn man
I am a huge fan of using PowerShell for scripting on Linux. I use it a ton on Windows already and it allows me to write damn near cross-platform scripts with no extra effort. I still usually use a Bash or Fish shell but for scripting I love being able to utilize powershell.
Yeah. The best way to write any
bashscript is:apt/yum install PowerShell; pwsh script.ps1
No, Makefile syntax is more extreme.
Sure, but bash is more relatable, I think
I swapped from Make to Just: https://github.com/casey/just
Way better, IMO. Super simple logic, just as flexible.
I find
Makefileisn’t too bad, as long as I can stay away fromautomakeandautoreconf.
to be honest I agree and thought we would be using something more intuitive by now
Everything is text! And different programs output in different styles. And certain programs can only read certain styles. And certain programs can only convert from some into others. And don’t get me started on
IFS.I think the cool kids are using Nu now
Meh. I had a bash job for 6 years. I couldn’t forget it if I wanted to. I imagine most people don’t use it enough for it to stick. You get good enough at it, and there’s no need to reach for python.
When I was finishing of my degree at Uni I actually spent a couple of months as an auxiliary teacher giving professional training in Unix, which included teaching people shell script.
Nowadays (granted, almost 3 decades later), I remember almost nothing of shell scripting, even though I’ve stayed on the Technical Career Track doing mostly Programming since.
So that joke is very much me irl.
It seems like it does stuff differently for the sake of it being different.
It’s more like bash did it one way and everyone who came after decided that was terrible and should be done a different way (for good reason).
Looking right at you -eq and your weird ass syntax
if [[ $x -eq $y ]]That was the point where I closed the bash tutorial I was on, and decided to just use python and
subprocess.run()-eq
Yeah, like infix, so between operands, but dashed like a flag so should come before arguments. Very odd.
You better not look at powershell in that case :p
The sad thing is that even chatgpt can’t program in bash. I just want a simple script and every single time it just doesn’t work. I always just end up saying “write this in python instead”.
Python’s usually the better choice anyway tbf. I know piping isn’t as good, but there are so many footguns!
Nushell and Fish can be really convenient too.
I used to adhere to sh for an OpenBSD machine but I switched to python, Rust and Go for, even simple things.
Python is just as portable these days (on modern hardware, caveats, caveats).
Honestly so intuitive that I start there too unless I have a need for speed or distinct memory control. There’s no job too small for a python script.
The older you get, the more things are like programming in bash.
My google history hits for powershell for loop is is in the dozens.
