what's the best shell

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > YOSPOS > what's the best shell

the best poll is:
	bash
	zsh
	fish
	cmd.exe
	powershell
	COMMAND.COM
	some ancient greybeard poo poo ive never heard of
	the JS console in ur browser
	gently caress off moo cow
	checkbox poll

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There Will Be Penalty: May 18, 2002; Makes a great pet!

ksh was legit cool and good before bash became a thing

it supported arrow keys and yes that was nifty at the time

# ? Aug 3, 2017 23:19

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# ? May 7, 2024 17:58

Shaggar: Apr 26, 2006

doritos locos nacho flavor

# ? Aug 3, 2017 23:20

SmokaDustbowl: Feb 12, 2001; by vyelkin; Fun Shoe

Shaggar posted:

doritos locos nacho flavor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sSVqaSl89A

# ? Aug 3, 2017 23:24

Silver Alicorn: Mar 30, 2008; 𝓪 𝓻𝓮𝓭 𝓹𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓪 𝓲𝓼 𝓪 𝓬𝓾𝓻𝓲𝓸𝓾𝓼 𝓼𝓸𝓻𝓽 𝓸𝓯 𝓬𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓽𝓾𝓻𝓮

I tried one of those once, the shell was very fragile

# ? Aug 3, 2017 23:26

Notorious b.s.d.: Jan 25, 2003; by Reene

There Will Be Penalty posted:

ksh was legit cool and good before bash became a thing

it supported arrow keys and yes that was nifty at the time

ksh is still better than bash. the vi/emacs modes in ksh are much more sophisticated than gnu readline, which is what bash use. the scripting is at least modestly less broken.

the reason that the world standardized on bash was purely licensing. bash was almost as good, but the gpl beat the pants off having to pay at&t money, and ksh93 wasn't open sourced until it was way too late.

i'm pretty ok with that. don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good etc etc

that said, now that ksh93 is freely available there's no reason not to use it interactively in preference to bash

# ? Aug 3, 2017 23:28

Asymmetric POSTer: Aug 17, 2005

Silver Alicorn posted:

I tried one of those once, the shell was very fragile

dsyp

# ? Aug 4, 2017 00:07

Cybernetic Vermin: Apr 18, 2005

just never write a bash script and i'm fine with bash. the fact that people (which, unfortunately includes me at times) open a file to script a task, blank for a moment, then go #!/bin/sh, and then invariably write a surprisingly compact representation of a broad selection of standard errors and security issues, is enough reason to actually dislike bash

oh, but add the bindings
bind '"\e[A": history-search-backward'
bind '"\e[B": history-search-forward'

should have been the default

# ? Aug 4, 2017 00:16

OldAlias: Nov 2, 2013

bash scripting is fun and powerful

# ? Aug 4, 2017 00:59

akadajet: Sep 14, 2003

OldAlias posted:

bash scripting is fun

fun is super subjective

# ? Aug 4, 2017 01:33

There Will Be Penalty: May 18, 2002; Makes a great pet!

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

the scripting is at least modestly less broken.

can you provide more details on why that's the case?

i've actually done a shitload of bash scripting

# ? Aug 4, 2017 02:21

Broken Machine: Oct 22, 2010

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

ksh is still better than bash. the vi/emacs modes in ksh are much more sophisticated than gnu readline, which is what bash use. the scripting is at least modestly less broken.

the reason that the world standardized on bash was purely licensing. bash was almost as good, but the gpl beat the pants off having to pay at&t money, and ksh93 wasn't open sourced until it was way too late.

i'm pretty ok with that. don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good etc etc

that said, now that ksh93 is freely available there's no reason not to use it interactively in preference to bash

ksh is good, openbsd still uses a proper port of it and it's the standard shell on most commercial unix. set -o vi, maybe a profile and it's nice

# ? Aug 4, 2017 16:24

Notorious b.s.d.: Jan 25, 2003; by Reene

There Will Be Penalty posted:

can you provide more details on why that's the case?

multidimensional arrays
hashes
gui bindings
functions have real return values instead of an exit status

ksh is a lot closer to perl or python, feature-wise

it still lacks a debugger, though. in a world where perl and python exist, you would have to be a complete loving idiot to choose ksh over a real scripting language.

There Will Be Penalty posted:

i've actually done a shitload of bash scripting

you poor bastard

i have not done any significant work on shell scripts since 2010 and if i have it my way, i never will, ever again, ever

holy poo poo is shell scripting terrible

unironically the worst idea ever integrated into an operating system

# ? Aug 4, 2017 16:34

Poopernickel: Oct 28, 2005; electricity bad; Fun Shoe

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

holy poo poo is shell scripting terrible

unironically the worst idea ever integrated into an operating system

look at this wronghaver

shell scripts can deffo be a little messy, but they're quick and easy and make automating stuff simple

a 10-line shell script can easily do the work of a 100-line python script, and will work on the shittiest embeddedest linux u got

# ? Aug 4, 2017 16:55

Notorious b.s.d.: Jan 25, 2003; by Reene

Poopernickel posted:

look at this wronghaver

shell scripts can deffo be a little messy, but they're quick and easy and make automating stuff simple

a 10-line shell script can easily do the work of a 100-line python script, and will work on the shittiest embeddedest linux u got

my rule for shell scripts is that if you ever nest a control structure, it is already past time to port to a real scripting language. ten lines will often already be over the top.

as for lovely embedded linux, if you can deal with the massive amount of forking and cpu/memory waste implied by shell, you can also deal with perl.

lastly, with respect to brevity, if python is too wordy, use perl or ruby. typically one can port a shell script to perl line for line! and perl has a real debugger.

i don't really care what scripting language you use. friends don't let friends write shell.

# ? Aug 4, 2017 17:02

carry on then: Jul 10, 2010; by VideoGames
(and can't post for 10 years!)

some tooling i maintain consists of a wizard that fills out templates of jcl jobs which call into various parts of a 2000 line shell script that scrapes config files and then calls more shell scripts to kick off the actual tooling itself, which is in java

hail shell satan

# ? Aug 4, 2017 17:13

Notorious b.s.d.: Jan 25, 2003; by Reene

carry on then posted:

some tooling i maintain consists of a wizard that fills out templates of jcl jobs which call into various parts of a 2000 line shell script that scrapes config files and then calls more shell scripts to kick off the actual tooling itself, which is in java

hail shell satan

scala makes a really really good scripting language and can be invoked with a shebang, just like shell. (you set the classpath and JAVA_HOME and so on in a "shell preamble" at the top of the file, which is ignored by the scala interpreter)

then you can call into the java tooling directly, using its native api

# ? Aug 4, 2017 18:26

There Will Be Penalty: May 18, 2002; Makes a great pet!

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

hashes

bash does have associative arrays now

quote:

functions have real return values instead of an exit status

that's neat. but *most* of the time when you're writing lovely glue language garbage like most shell scripting is, the output of a function is good enough to use as a "return value" in most situaitons i guess. but yeah, there are most definitely times when i use perl.

quote:

you poor bastard

# ? Aug 4, 2017 18:36

carry on then: Jul 10, 2010; by VideoGames
(and can't post for 10 years!)

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

using its native api

lol doesn't have one, unless you wanna count invoking main()

# ? Aug 4, 2017 20:17

Ellie Crabcakes: Feb 1, 2008; Stop emailing my boyfriend Gay Crungus

Cybernetic Vermin posted:

just never write a bash script

Notorious b.s.d. posted:

multidimensional arrays

hashes

gui bindings

functions have real return values instead of an exit status

Hmm, sounds interestng.

quote:

ksh is a lot closer to perl or python, feature-wise

# ? Aug 4, 2017 23:49

There Will Be Penalty: May 18, 2002; Makes a great pet!

http://blog.fpmurphy.com/2010/05/ksh93-using-types-to-create-object-orientated-scripts.html#sthash.snlyNUcl.dpbs

dear mother of god

# ? Aug 5, 2017 00:01

Captain Foo: May 11, 2004; we vibin'
we slidin'
we breathin'
we dyin'

There Will Be Penalty posted:

http://blog.fpmurphy.com/2010/05/ksh93-using-types-to-create-object-orientated-scripts.html#sthash.snlyNUcl.dpbs

dear mother of god

what in .tarnation

# ? Aug 5, 2017 01:05

Breakfast All Day: Oct 21, 2004

There Will Be Penalty posted:

i didnt know the term "shell" when i was a child so i thought this program was dos 's hell

# ? Aug 5, 2017 02:12

Startyde: Apr 19, 2007; come post with us, forever and ever and ever

bash especially bash4 is cool and good op
add in mawk and vim embedded awk highlighting and you got yourselves some good hi-po fuckkn scripting

# ? Aug 5, 2017 02:55

Gazpacho: Jun 18, 2004; by Fluffdaddy; Slippery Tilde

There Will Be Penalty posted:

http://blog.fpmurphy.com/2010/05/ksh93-using-types-to-create-object-orientated-scripts.html#sthash.snlyNUcl.dpbs

# ? Aug 5, 2017 04:29

Gazpacho: Jun 18, 2004; by Fluffdaddy; Slippery Tilde

although making each object a directory with inheritance via symlinks would be a more unixy approach imo

Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 04:36 on Aug 5, 2017

# ? Aug 5, 2017 04:33

There Will Be Penalty: May 18, 2002; Makes a great pet!

just don't fucken ask me why they're called "discipline functions" or how name spaces work. i tried to find examples of the latter but it's all poo poo on stackoverflow that doesn't explain poo poo

# ? Aug 5, 2017 05:17

Gazpacho: Jun 18, 2004; by Fluffdaddy; Slippery Tilde

Gazpacho posted:

although making each object a directory with inheritance via symlinks would be a more unixy approach imo

to illustrate, here's a script that creates a board game object and invokes a method on it to initialize its board. (may contain bugs!)

Bash code:

#!/bin/bash

UNIVERSE="$HOME/universe"
mkdir -p "$UNIVERSE/instances"

createGame()
{
	local this=$(mktemp -dp "$UNIVERSE/instances" XXXXXX)
	mkdir "$this"/.state
	cat <<-'EOF' >"$this/initBoard"
		#!/bin/bash
		this="$(dirname "$0")"
		cat >"$this/.state/board"
	EOF
	chmod u+x "$this"/*
	echo "$this"
}


game=$(createGame)
sed -e 's/\$$//' <<'EOF' | $game/initBoard
  X$
 X $
X  $
EOF

Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Aug 5, 2017

# ? Aug 5, 2017 06:39