murex VS hasura-ci-cd-action

This is how murex works too https://github.com/lmorg/murex/blob/master/config/defaults/p...

I agree. I’ve written about this before but this is what murex (1) does. It reimplements some of coreutils where there are benefits in doing so (eg sed, grep etc -like parsing of lists that are in formats other than flat lines of text. Such as JSON arrays)

Mutex does this by having these utilities named slightly different to their POSIX counterparts. So you can use all of the existing CLI tools completely but additionally have a bunch of new stuff too.

Far too many alt shells these days try to replace coreutils and that just creates friction in my opinion.

1. https://murex.rocks

This is exactly what Murex shell does. It has lots of builtin tools for querying structured data (of varying formats) but also supports POSIX pipes for using existing tools like `jq` et al seamlessly too.

https://murex.rocks

Stable is a problem because a lot of these shells don’t offer any guarantees for breaking changes.

My own shell, https://github.com/lmorg/murex is committed to backwards compatibility but even here, there are occasional changes made that might break backwards compatibility. Though I do push back on such changes as much as possible, to the extent that most of my scripts from 5 years ago still run unmodified.

This is similar to how my shell works. It still just passes bytes around but additionally passes information about how those bytes could be interpreted. A schema if you will. So it works as cleanly with POSIX / GNU / et al tools as it does with fancy JSON, YAML, CSV and other document formats.

It basically sits somewhere between Powershell and Bash: typed pipelines like Powershell but without sacrificing familiarity with all the CLI commands you already use day in and day out.

https://github.com/lmorg/murex

As an aside, I’m about to drop a massive update in the next few days that will make the shell even more intuitive to use.

It's possible without any kernel changes. My shell (https://github.com/lmorg/murex) already supports doing that.

The way it works is it uses fd3 to communicate schema information so it can natively support all the existing "dumb" pipes without any modification but any new tools can be written to send objects instead (albeit byte encoded).

It's not as elegant as PowerShell sending .NET objects natively, but then PowerShell doesn't work with existing CLI tools natively (it needs wrapper scripts to convert them into PowerShell commands). Whereas my shell is fully backwards compatible while still supporting a suite of additional functionality too.

> getting the shell quoting hell right

Shameless plug coming, it this has been a pain point for me too. I found the issue with quotes (in most languages, but particularly in Bash et al) is that the same character is used to close the quote as is used to open it.m. So in my own shell I added support to use parentheses as quotes in addition to the single and double quotation ASCII symbols. This then allows you to nest quotation marks.

https://murex.rocks/docs/parser/brace-quote.html

You also don’t need to worry about quoting variables as variables are expanded to an argv[] item rather than expanded out to a command line and then any spaces converted into new argv[]s (or in layman’s terms, variables behave like you’d expect variables to behave).

https://github.com/lmorg/murex

Some shells have this built in, like Fish and my own one ( https://murex.rocks ) too

I like to think this thing I wrote isn't so bad and is fairly readable, even if you don't know anything about shell programming:

https://github.com/GavinRay97/hasura-ci-cd-action/blob/a9731...

I write a LOT of bash/shell scripts. And I don't like it, it's just part of what I have to do.

Learning a handful of bash idioms and best-practices has made a massive impact for me, and life much easier. The shell is something you cannot avoid if you're a programmer or other sort of code-wrangler.

You can interact with it + be (mostly) clueless and still get things done, but it's a huge return-on-investment to set up "shellcheck" and lookup "bash'isms", etc.

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(Off-topic: I am convinced Ruby cannot be beaten for shell-scripting purposes. If I had a wish, it would be that every machine had a tiny Ruby interpreter on it so I could just use Ruby. I'm not even "a Ruby guy", it's just unreasonably good/easy for this sort of thing. And I keep my mind open for better alternatives constantly.)

Example of near-identical script in bash vs Ruby:

https://github.com/GavinRay97/hasura-ci-cd-action/blob/maste...

https://github.com/GavinRay97/hasura-ci-cd-action/blob/maste...