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0 pointshiepph3y ago0 comments

I can't really stand Bash's arcane syntax, it drains my brain power (and time of consulting manual) every time I have to work with it. Switching to Fish has been a breath of fresh air for me. I think some people who want to use only Bash need to open their conservative mind. All of my personal shell scripts now are converted to Fish. If I want to run some POSIX-compatible script then I just use `bash scripts.sh`

Of course Bash is ubiquitous so I use them whenever I can in the company. A golden rule for me is: if it has more than 50 lines then I should probably write in a decent programming language (e.g. Ruby). It makes maintenance so much easier.

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Bost3y ago

Bash as a language is a downright bad. Especially the mess around `,",'. Fish is better is in this regard, however the syntax of Fish's string-related functions is unbearable. (I have a growing suspicion, with string-related functions, syntactically valid expressions can be constructed, which don't compile!)

However, neither Bash nor Fish were created with Composability in mind, which is a show-stopper for me.

IMO don't use Bash if the script is longer than 20 lines and don't use Fish if it's longer than 50. Use Python. If you want to use a proper(!) language use any LISP-Dialect like Babashka, Guile Scheme, Racket, etc. If you need Types have a look at Haskell-Scripting.

EDIT: To clarify, use Fish for its bling-bling capabilities, don't use it for scripting and configuring your machine(s).

coliveira3y ago

This battle was lost a long time ago. Bash is the standard on most UNIX systems. If you change this reality, one might even start to try to think about writing in fish or some other new shell. But I will not even consider another shell for scripts that need to be run by other people.

blueflow3y ago

POSIX shell is the standard, not bash.

chubot3y ago

That ship has sailed, because busybox ash and dash continually implement some of bash features and semantics, which come from ksh.

And OSH implements almost all of bash

That is, The posix shell spec is missing a lot of reality. It’s not very actively maintained, unfortunately

The canonical example is not having local vars, which basically every shell supports

4 more replies

counttheforks3y ago

Not going to install fish on all of my servers just so i can run your scripts, sorry. They already have bash pre-installed, though.

> If I want to run some POSIX-compatible script then I just use `bash scripts.sh`

Shouldn't you be using a shebang?

lannisterstark3y ago

>Shouldn't you be using a shebang?

Why would they use a shebang? `bash script.sh` works perfectly fine. Ever used a terminal?

Macha3y ago

I use fish as an interactive shell but I don't write fish scripts. Once you accept a script has dependency there seems little reason not to go all the way to python (or usually I just go all the way to rust now, but I suspect others may disagree with me more on that than python)

colordrops3y ago

If you are going to write in a language that requires installing additional dependencies on every machine, why not something like Lua? The great thing about bash for me is that it just works on most machines without dependencies.

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