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Hence, I thought we could make a Bash linting tool that verifies compliance with the Shell Style Guide by Google. To do so, a brief start was made here: https://github.com/TruCol/checkstyle-for-bash It identifies/lists elements in that style guide that may be verified automatically. Since Bash has been around longer than me, I think there may be some people better suited for the development of this enhanced linter. Hence, I thought it might be wise, for impact and usability, to share this idea here.
What do you say, HN?
[0]: https://google.github.io/styleguide/shellguide.html
- sh: https://github.com/mvdan/sh
After working with Bash and Shellcheck for a few months, I noticed I could improve my code quality by making it compliant with the Shell Style Guide by Google[0]. While working on that, I thought some aspects of this Shell style guide can be verified automatically, granted some assumptions/opinions are formed. So I looked around for linting tools and autoformatters for Bash:
Shellcheck: https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck
From Asynchronous Lint Engine (ALE): https://github.com/dense-analysis/ale/blob/master/supported-tools.md
- cspell: https://github.com/streetsidesoftware/cspell/tree/main/packages/cspell
- Bash Language Server: https://github.com/bash-lsp/bash-language-server
- shlint: https://github.com/duggan/shlint (archived)
Every web application I work with has this idea of a "run" script, basically a self isolated shell script to help automate running certain commands. Sort of like a Makefile except with the full power of your shell.
For example: https://github.com/nickjj/docker-flask-example/blob/main/run
In a bigger project this file tends to grow quite large, even when you have the power of a programming language available to you there's plenty of tasks where it makes sense to keep it as a shell script.
The run script for my infrastructure repo at one place I work for is almost 1,500 lines shell scripting. It's not a big jumbled mess either, it's very organized and optimized to make running long commands faster and less error prone (even if they happen to be called in CI).
If it is for myself: murex (my own DevOps focused shell: https://murex.rocks)
If it is for work: either Bash or whatever that companies preferred software development language (over the last ~20 years that's included: Pascal, Visual Basic, PL/SQL, Perl, PHP, Python, Typescript and others I've likely forgotten. Different companies will have different preferences)
If performance matters then these days Go is my "goto" language because it's a good compromise in terms of developer productivity and application performance. But I've used Java, C and C++ too. Depending on the particular problem I'm trying to solve.
...and if you ask me again in 5 years then the answer will be completely different again.
The sort answer is: there's no such thing as a single answer. Everyone will have their own preferences and business requirements.
You might want to check out 'hck' to replace 'cut'.
Much of the time that people are writing shell scripts, they're writing them not because they prefer shell syntax to that of some other language, but rather because they're creating a script that needs to be widely disseminated/deployed to all sorts of machines with unpredictable install bases.
This is why a large fraction of the shell scripts that exist in the world still hold to Bourne shell syntax, rather than using any of the syntax extensions from its descendant shells — Bourne shell (or at least, something at /bin/sh that interprets Bourne-shell syntax) is part of the POSIX standard. So you can expect any POSIX system — no matter how weird — to be able to run (Bourne) shell scripts. You can run them on Alpine. You can run them on Busybox. You can run them on your NAS. You can run them on your router. You can run them in your initramfs, on your Kubernetes nodes, on your Mosix nodes, whatever.
For an example of the type of script I'm talking about — see e.g. the script you download+run when you run the command-line on https://rustup.rs: https://github.com/hsivonen/rustup.rs/blob/master/rustup-ini...
There's absolutely no benefit that this script gets from being written directly in POSIX-compiliant Bourne shell syntax, rather than being written in something that compiles to it; any more than programs for your PC would benefit from being written directly in ASM rather than in something that compiles to it.
Oh people have tried - here are a few https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10239235/are-there-any-l...
I vaguely remember quite liking bish when I saw it years ago https://github.com/tdenniston/bish but it looks like no commits in 6 years.
This shelljs thing looks more promising, but really tedious to use https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs - shell.rm('-rf', 'out/Release'); I'd rather suffer proper bash than have to do that sort of thing.
Nothing seems to have really caught on so far. Bash is easy to learn and hack on, and before you know it, that simple install.sh that started out moving a few files around is 5000 lines, unmaintainable, and critical to bootstrapping your software :)
Oh people have tried - here are a few https://stackoverflow.com/questions/10239235/are-there-any-l...
I vaguely remember quite liking bish when I saw it years ago https://github.com/tdenniston/bish but it looks like no commits in 6 years.
This shelljs thing looks more promising, but really tedious to use https://github.com/shelljs/shelljs - shell.rm('-rf', 'out/Release'); I'd rather suffer proper bash than have to do that sort of thing.
Nothing seems to have really caught on so far. Bash is easy to learn and hack on, and before you know it, that simple install.sh that started out moving a few files around is 5000 lines, unmaintainable, and critical to bootstrapping your software :)