Like programming in bash

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

My google history hits for powershell for loop is is in the dozens.

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".

I still have to look up the exact syntax of ifs and whiles.

I've coded in bash for a while

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.

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

PSA: Run ShellCheck on your shell scripts. It turns up a shocking number of programming errors. https://www.shellcheck.net/

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!

to be honest I agree and thought we would be using something more intuitive by now

No, Makefile syntax is more extreme.

Unironically love powershell

every control structure should end in the backwards spelling of how they started

Regex

Edit: to everyone who responded, I use regex infrequently enough that the knowledge never really crystalizes. By the time I need it for this one thing again, I haven't touched it in like a year.

Je comprend tellement! Je répond en français pour ma première réponse sur Lemmy juste pour voir comment ça va être géré!

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…

That's why I use nushell. Very convenient for writing scripts that you can understand. Obviously, it cannot beat Python in terms of prototyping, but at least I don't have to relearn it everytime.

There's always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: "If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you'll wish you wrote it in a real programming language."

I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like "Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell." ...around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It's no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It's got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.

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.

Wait im not the only one? I think i relearned bash more times than i can remember.

I don't normally say this, but the AI tools I've used to help me write bash were pretty much spot on.

Maybe applies more to regex, the write only language.

Clearly you don't write enough bash scripts.

Knowing that there is still a bash script i wrote around 5 years ago still running the entirety of my high scool lab makes me sorry for the poor bastard that will need to fix those hieroglyphs as soon as some package breaks the script. I hate that i used bash, but it was the easiest option at the time on that desolate server.

It seems like it does stuff differently for the sake of it being different.

So true. Every time I have to look up how to write a bash for loop. Where does the semicolon go? Where is the newline? Is it terminated with done? Or with end? The worst part with bash is that when you do it wrong, most of the time there is no error but something completely wrong happens.

Today I tried to write bash (I think)

I grabbed a bunch of commands, slapped a bunch of "&&" to string them together and saved them to a .sh file.

It didn't work as expected and I did not, at all, look at any documentation during the process. (This is obviously on me, I'll try harder next time)

I’ve switched to nutshell imo. Bash is in need of a replacement

Any no-SQL syntax for interacting with databases.

This. But Pandas and Numpy.

Pandas and Numpy and Bash.

I don’t write very small shell scripts because I am not a job destroyer.

Bash substitution is regex-level wizardry.

I mastered and forgot almost entirely RegEx several times now

Or it’s because other people are assholes. And write shit garbage. And then you go to fix a bug or add an enhancement. And then you are stuck.

I feel same with regex....

Incredibly true for me these days. But don't fret, shellcheck and tldp.org is all you need. And maybe that one stackoverflow answer about how to get the running script's directory

VLOOKUP. Every time. Also Catan Cities and Knights.

This is why I finally switched to nushell.

Very true. Been programming/scripting in Bash since many many years, I could almost consider myself an "expert", however I still need to look up the same crap over and over again, since remembering weird symbol constellations is the last thing you should do, when you actually just wanna achieve a goal with the script and not learn how to summon the spirit of some C-related language creator.