swift-sh VS pyxargs

Yes, swift CLI will compile and run your swift file.

But many people also want to use libraries. For Python, they use the system libraries or work within an environment with installed libraries (i.e., the library-install process happens at environment-configuration time).

In Swift, the easiest way to consume libraries is using packages, but that requires a Package.swift declaring the project scope for the script file (which must comply with top-level and main-entrypoint code requirements).

The easiest way to do that when scripting is a swift tool that manages the process of gathering your library dependencies, auto-generating a project, building the tool, and caching it all so there's no overhead the next time.

The best available tool now is https://github.com/mxcl/swift-sh. It reads dependency information off import comments.

It can also generate the project for you, if/when you want to build in XCode (e.g., move into a more complex application, perhaps requiring sandbox declarations).

Working scripts are not always updated, so any script-build tool has to maintain backwards compatibility, but the swift package manager has changed a lot in recent versions. swift-sh seems to err on the side of backwards compatibility, and does not support e.g., the most recent dependency versioning styles.

Swift-forum discussions about better support for scripting haven't resulted in any official tooling.

Note that this has nothing to do with the Raspberry Pi. You'll have the same issue running on the command-line. If you wish to test your programs on your computer where you have more tools and horse-power, I find swift-sh gives a good command-line experience and is a great alternative to Playgrounds especially for small tests.

> I too can never remember jq syntax when I need to. I usually just end up writing a Python script

Same here! That's why for small things I made pyxargs [1] to use python in the shell. In another thread I also just learned of pyp [2] which I haven't tried yet but looks like it'd be even better for this use case.

[1] https://github.com/elesiuta/pyxargs

[2] https://github.com/hauntsaninja/pyp

I personally use fish, but mostly for the out of the box auto completions and highlighting, I don't use it for actual scripting, nor have it set as the login shell due to the 2nd reason you mentioned.

I mostly use python as well, and for some short commands I made pyxargs [1] which lets you run python code on stdin, or a walk of your current directory.

[1] https://github.com/elesiuta/pyxargs

pyxargs --py "print('{}') if os.path.ismount('{}') else ''" | pyxargs fusermount -u {}

My primary use case was using this with ffmpeg due to the encoding problem with xargs [2].

It can also run commands in parallel using a terminal multiplexer so outputs don't get mixed up or if they require user input.

[1] https://github.com/elesiuta/pyxargs