my website's backend is made with bash, it calls make for every request and it probably has hundreds of remote arbitrary code execution bugs that will get me pwned someday, it's great
edit: to clarify, it uses a rust program i made to expose the bash scripts as http endpoints, i'm not crazy enough to implement http in bash
it behaves like a static file server, but if a file has the others-execute permission bit set it executes the file instead of reading it
it's surprisingly nice for prototyping since you can just write a cli program and it's automatically available over http too
i thought it was neat how php lets you write your website's logic with the same directory tree pattern that clients consume it from, but i didn't want to learn php so i made my own, worse version
I've taken some precautions, it's running in a container as an unprivileged user and the only writable mount is the directory where make writes rendered pages, but i probably should move it into a vm if i want to be completely safe lol
I know about the CGI standard, but mine does things a little differently (executable files don't just render pages but also handle logging, access control, etc. when put in special positions within a directory), so I still think it was worth the afternoon i spent making it.
Before nginx was a thing, I worked with a guy who forked apache httpd and wrote this blog in C, like, literally embedded html and css inside the server, so when he made a tpyo or was adding another post he had to recompile the source code. The performance was out of this world.
Blog content was stored in memory and it was served with zero-copy to the socket, so yea, it's way faster. It was before times of php-fpm and opcache that we're using now. Back then things were deployed and communicated using tcp sockets (tcp to rails, django or php) or reading from a disk, when the best HDDs were 5600rpm, but rare to find on shared hosting.
This reminds me of one of my older projects. I wanted to learn more about network communications, so I started working on a simple P2P chat app. It wasn't anything fancy, but I really enjoyed working on it. One challenge I faced was that, at the time, I didn't know how to listen for user input while handling network communication simultaneously. So, after I had managed to get multiple TCP sockets working on one thread, I thought, why not open another socket for HTTP communication? That way, I could incorporate a fancy web UI instead of just a CLI interface.
So, I wrote a simple HTTP server, which, in hindsight, might not have been necessary.
but effectively it's bash, I think /bin/sh is a symlink to bash on every system I know of...
Edit: I feel corrected, thanks for the information, all the systems I used, had a symlink to bash. Also it was not intended to recommend using bash functionality when having a shebang !#/bin/sh. As someone other pointed out, recommendation would be #!/usr/bin/env bash, or !#/bin/sh if you know that you're not using bash specific functionality.
Still don't do this. If you use bash specific syntax with this head, that's a bashism and causes issues with people using zsh for example. Or with Debian/*buntu, who use dash as init shell.
Just use #!/bin/bash or #!/usr/bin/env bash if you're funny.
Beginning with DebianSqueeze, Debian uses Dash as the target of the /bin/sh symlink. Dash lacks many of the features one would expect in an interactive shell, making it faster and more memory efficient than Bash.
From DebianSqueeze to DebianBullseye, it was possible to select bash as the target of the /bin/sh symlink (by running dpkg-reconfigure dash). As of DebianBookworm, this is no longer supported.
It is a symlink, but bash will automatically enable posix compliance mode if you use it. So any bash specific features will bomb out unless you explicitly reset it in the script.
i thought most unix-like systems had it symlinked to a shell like dash. it's what i have on my system (void linux), of course not as an interactive shell lol
i use #!/bin/sh for posix scripts and #!/usr/bin/env bash for bash scripts. #!/bin/sh works for posix scripts since even if it's symlinked to bash, bash still supports posix features.