This may make some people pull their hair out, but I’d love to hear some arguments. I’ve had the impression that people really don’t like bash, not from here, but just from people I’ve worked with.
There was a task at work where we wanted something that’ll run on a regular basis, and doesn’t do anything complex aside from reading from the database and sending the output to some web API. Pretty common these days.
I can’t think of a simpler scripting language to use than bash. Here are my reasons:
- Reading from the environment is easy, and so is falling back to some value; just do
${VAR:-fallback}; no need to write another if-statement to check for nullity. Wanna check if a variable’s set to something expected?if [[ <test goes here> ]]; then <handle>; fi - Reading from arguments is also straightforward; instead of a
import os; os.args[1]in Python, you just do$1. - Sending a file via HTTP as part of an
application/x-www-form-urlencodedrequest is super easy withcurl. In most programming languages, you’d have to manually open the file, read them into bytes, before putting it into your request for the http library that you need to import.curlalready does all that. - Need to read from a
curlresponse and it’s JSON? Reach forjq. - Instead of having to set up a connection object/instance to your database, give
sqlite,psql,duckdbor whichever cli db client a connection string with your query and be on your way. - Shipping is… fairly easy? Especially if docker is common in your infrastructure. Pull
Ubuntuordebianoralpine, install your dependencies through the package manager, and you’re good to go. If you stay within Linux and don’t have to deal with differences in bash and core utilities between different OSes (looking at you macOS), and assuming you tried to not to do anything too crazy and bring in necessary dependencies in the form of calling them, it should be fairly portable.
Sure, there can be security vulnerability concerns, but you’d still have to deal with the same problems with your Pythons your Rubies etc.
For most bash gotchas, shellcheck does a great job at warning you about them, and telling how to address those gotchas.
There are probably a bunch of other considerations but I can’t think of them off the top of my head, but I’ve addressed a bunch before.
So what’s the dealeo? What am I missing that may not actually be addressable?
We are not taking about use of Bash in dev vs use Bash in production. This is imho incorrect question that skirts around the real problem in software development. We talk about use of Bash for simple enough tasks where code is rarely changed ( if not written once and thrown away ) and where every primitive language or DSL is ok, where when it comes to building of medium or complex size software systems where decomposition, complex data structures support, unit tests, error handling, concurrency, etc is a big of a deal - Bash really sucks because it does not allow one to deal with scaling challenges, by scaling I mean where you need rapidly change huge code base according changes of requirements and still maintain good quality of entire code. Bash is just not designed for that.
But not everything needs to scale, at least, if you don’t buy into the doctrine that everything has to be designed and written to live forever. If robust, scalable solutions is the nature of your work and there’s nothing else that can exist, then yeah, Bash likely have no place in that world. If you need any kind of handling more complicated than just getting an error and doing something else, then Bash is not it.
Just because Bash isn’t designed for something you want to do, doesn’t mean it sucks. It’s just not the right tool. Just because you don’t practice law, doesn’t mean you suck; you just don’t do law. You can say that you suck at law though.
Yep. Like said - "We talk about use of Bash for simple enough tasks ... where every primitive language or DSL is ok", so Bash does not suck in general and I myself use it a lot in proper domains, but I just do not use it for tasks / domains with complexity ( in all senses, including, but not limited to team work ) growing over time ...
If your company ever has >2 people, it will become a problem.
You’re speaking prophetically there and I simply do not agree with that prophecy.
If you and your team think you need to extend that bash script to do more, stop and consider writing it in some other languages. You’ve move the goalpost, so don’t expect that you can just build on your previous strategy and that it’ll work.
If your “problem” stems from “well your colleagues will not likely be able to read or write bash well enough”, well then just don’t write it in bash.