Programming

Wanna check if a variable’s set to something expected? if [[ <test goes here> ]]; then <handle>; fi

Hey, you can't just leave out "test goes here". That's worst part by a long shot.
The rest of the syntax, I will have to look up every time I try to write it, but at least I can mostly guess what it does when reading. The test syntax on the other hand is just impossible to read without looking it up.

I also don't actually know how to look that up for the double brackets, so that's fun. For the single bracket, it took me years to learn that that's actually a command and you can do man [ to view the documentation.

In your own description you added a bunch of considerations, requirements of following specific practices, having specific knowledge, and a ton of environmental requirements.

For simple scripts or duck tape schedules all of that is fine. For anything else, I would be at least mindful if not skeptical of bash being a good tool for the job.

Bash is installed on all linux systems. I would not be very concerned about some dependencies like sqlite, if that is what you're using. But very concerned about others, like jq, which is an additional tool and requirement where you or others will eventually struggle with diffuse dependencies or managing a managed environment.

Even if you query sqlite or whatever tool with the command line query tool, you have to be aware that getting a value like that into bash means you lose a lot of typing and structure information. That's fine if you get only one or very few values. But I would have strong aversions when it goes beyond that.

You seem to be familiar with Bash syntax. But others may not be. It's not a simple syntax to get into and intuitively understand without mistakes. There's too many alternatives of if-ing and comparing values. It ends up as magic. In your example, if you read code, you may guess that :- means fallback, but it's not necessarily obvious. And certainly not other magic flags and operators.

As an anecdote, I guess the most complex thing I have done with Bash was scripting a deployment and starting test-runs onto a distributed system (and I think collecting results? I don't remember). Bash was available and copying and starting processes via ssh was simple and robust enough. Notably, the scope and env requirements were very limited.

I agree with your points, except if the script ever needs maintaining by someone else’s they will curse you and if it gets much more complicated it can quickly become spaghetti. But I do have a fair number of bash scripts running on cron jobs, sometimes its simplicity is unbeatable!

Personally though the language I reach for when I need a script is Python with the click library, it handles arguments and is really easy to work with. If you want to keep python deps down you can also use the sh module to run system commands like they’re regular python, pretty handy

I don't disagree with this, and honestly I would probably support just using bash like you said if I was in a team where this was suggested.

I think no matter how simple a task is there are always a few things people will eventually want to do with it:

• Reproduce it locally
• Run unit tests, integration tests, smoke tests, whatever tests
• Expand it to do more complex things or make it more dynamic
• Monitor it in tools like Datadog

If you have a whole project already written in Python, Go, Rust, Java, etc, then just writing more code in this project might be simpler, because all the tooling and methodology is already integrated. A script might not be so present for many developers who focus more on the code base, and as such out of sight out of mind sets in, and no one even knows about the script.

There is also the consideration that many people simply dislike bash since it's an odd language and many feel it's difficult to do simple things with it.

due to these reasons, although I would agree with making the script, I would also be inclined to have the script temporarily while another solution is being implemented.

Well then you guys will love what this guy (by tha name "icitry") did with bash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_WGoPaNPMY

He created a youtube clone with Bash

It's ok for very small scripts that are easy to reason through. I've used it extensively in CI/CD, just because we were using Jenkins for that and it was the path of least resistance. I do not like the language though.

Bash is perfectly good for what you’re describing.

Run checkbashisms over your $PATH (grep for #!/bin/sh). That's the problem with Bash.
#!/bin/sh is for POSIX compliant shell scripts only, use #!/bin/bash if you use bash syntax.

Btw, i quite like yash.

Dude, pihole is bash.

https://github.com/pi-hole/pi-hole/blob/master/pihole

I'm fine with bash for ci/cd activities, for what you're talking about I'd maybe use bash to control/schedule running of a script in something like python to query and push to an api but I do totally get using the tools you have available.

I use bash a lot for automation but PowerShell is really nice for tasks like this and has been available in linux for a while. Seen it deployed into production for more or less this task, grabbing data from a sql server table and passing to SharePoint. It's more powerful than a shell language probably needs to be, but it's legitimately one of the nicer products MS has done.

End of the day, use the right tool for the job at hand and be aware of risks. You can totally make web requests from sql server using ole automation procedures, set up a trigger to fire on update and send data to an api from a stored proc, if I recall there's a reason they're disabled by default (it's been a very long time) but you can do it.

I've only ever used bash.

May I introduce you to rust script? Basically a wrapper to run rust scripts right from the command line. They can access the rust stdlib, crates, and so on, plus do error handling and much more.

Anti Commercial-AI license

Pretty much all languages are middleware, and most of the original code was shell/bash. All new employees in platform/devops want to immediately push their preferred language, they want java and rust environments. It's a pretty safe bet if they insist on using a specific language; then they don't know how awk or sed. Bash has all the tools you need, but good developers understand you write libraries for functionality that's missing. Modern languages like Python have been widely adopted and has a friendlier onboarding and will save you time though.

Saw this guy's post in another thread, he's strawmanning because of lack of knowledge.