bash VS coreutils

> Next you'll be telling me that I shouldn't use Bash because Bash 5.0 came out in 2018 and only got two minor point releases over the next 5 years. But that sounds dumb, huh?

What's dumb is not being able to tell the difference. It's not about the numbers.

https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/bash.git/ shows there are constant updates. Things are being worked on. Your example proves my whole point. There are updates every year for many years.

Express? Not so. There are many gaps in its history. And for a tool like Express that has way more surface area it is in need of a lot more testing and updating e.g. if NodeJs changes something it breaks.

Does Bash need to make sure it works with HTTP3, Brotli or many other things that came out? No.

> Because for the most part - it doesn't need them.

Right, let's go back to the Stone Age. You don't need clothes either - just a leaf. You're just so dismissive on innovation then why bother? You don't even need NodeJs. Back to assembly and punch cards...

> Is an ignorant take.

Yes, yours. As shown above by your example.

> People promote it because it's a good tool.

And how do you know that? Where are the stats? Or people just google for NodeJs server, see the top response being Express and just do that. The cycle then repeats. Have people promoting it actually benchmarked, compared and investigated all the tools before making this informed decision? I'm sure you've heard from each and everyone 1 of them to know the answer eh.

If anyone else is wondering (but it's probably just me), "compatibility level 50" doesn't mean that Bash has a complicated feature-detection algorithm that places compatibility on a scale from 0 to 100%. "Level 50" just means compatibility with bash 5.0.

The bash shell also has code in it to check for this same magic number. This is because bash is also available on systems where the kernel doesn't do #! processing, but people would still want their scripts to behave in a predictable manner. You can see this in execute_cmd.c from the current bash source code.

Well, have you looked at the bash source? The error message is around line 4481 in this file: https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/master/jobs.c

Was it some ancient bug? I cant seem to find a mention of it in bash changelog

Here is Bash's source code.

After I made the comment I actually decided to look up BASHs source code and here appears to be the part that handles errors if the filename is to be believed https://github.com/bminor/bash/blob/master/error.c

I present you a middle case: here's the source code for Gnu bash's cp command.

https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/commit/fcfba90d0d27a1...

A summary of other changes just released in GNU coreutils 9.5 are:

* mv accepts --exchange to swap files

> some are simple like yes(1)

Not that simple: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/yes.c

The -S / --split-string option[1] of /usr/bin/env is a relatively recent addition to GNU Coreutils. It's available starting from GNU Coreutils 8.30[2], released on 2018-07-01.

Beware of portability: it relies on a non-standard behavior from some operating systems. It only works for OS's that treat all the text after the first space as argument(s) to the shebanged executable; rather than just treating the whole string as an executable path (that can happen to contain spaces).

Fortunately this non-standard behavior is more the norm than the exception: it works at least on modern GNU/Linux, BSDs, and macOS.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/software/coreutils/manual/html_node/env-...

[2] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/b09dc6306e7affaf...

> building a cat from scratch

> That would be an interesting project.

Here is the source code of the OpenBSD implementation of cat:

> https://github.com/openbsd/src/blob/master/bin/cat/cat.c

and here of the GNU coreutils implementation:

> https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/cat.c

Thus: I don't think building a cat from scratch or creating a tutorial about that topic is particularly hard (even though the HN audience would likely be interested in it). :-)

the yes command, writing to /dev/null, is making IO calls, which interfere with predictable scheduling.

If you look at the source code for yes, https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/yes.c

it builds a buffer of output and then writes that in a for loop

  while (full_write (STDOUT_FILENO, buf, bufused) == bufused)

Looking at the source of nohup, if the execvp() of the child happens then it _must_ have already done the signal (SIGHUP, SIG_IGN) so - WTF?

This got me wondering so I went and looked and it seems like lo and behold there was actually a commit to the GNU ls source just 2 weeks ago.

https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/ls.c

"maint: prefer char32_t to wchar_t"

even an empty file? Yes. so now it was a file with a copyright disclaimer and nothing else. And the koan-like question comes to mind is "Can you copyright nothing?" well AT&T sure tried.

Then somebody said our programs should be well defined and not depend on a fluke of unix, which at this point was probable a good idea. so it became "exit 0"

Then somebody said we should write our system utilities in C instead of shell so it runs faster. openbsd still has a good example of how this would look.

http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/~checkout~/src/usr....

At some point gnu bureaucracy got involved and said all programs must support the '-h' flag. so that got added, then they said all programs must support locale so that got added. now days gnu true is an astonishing 80 lines long.

https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true....

http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/humor/ATT_Copyright_true.html

> Yes, ls is maintained. Although, maintained is a very strong word. It exists.

Why would it be a strong word? Here it is, in src/ls.c: https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils

It is then packaged by tens of operating system distributions, who themselves maintain extra patchsets, some of which are then upstreamed.

It is installed and used on millions (billions?) of devices, for 3 decades.

It's a very reliable and trusty "sharp stick of metal" :)