[Xophmeister]

The beauty of bash scripts is that anything with u+x in your PATH, aliases and user-defined functions become a first-class citizen with the same interface. The usual plumbing with pipes and redirection -- and sometimes some more advanced stuff like process substitution -- is often all you need.

Moving to Python, say, makes the control flow and the "software engineering" easier, for sure. However, don't underestimate the power of grep, sed and especially awk. I wouldn't want to reimplement a half-arsed, presumably non-bug-free version of awk in Python when I could have just used awk in the first place.

[tinix]

There's no reason you can't orchestrate awk and other tools from python though. (I doubt I'm the only one that's done that before).

[zwischenzug]

I wrote a tool to do that:

https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit

Among many other things I use it to test Kubernetes/OpenShift clusters in Vagrant for Chef recipes:

https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit-openshift-cluster/blob/ma...

and here's some others in a more 'native' python format:

https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit-scripts/

https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit-scripts/blob/master/logme...

https://github.com/ianmiell/shutit-scripts/blob/master/gnupl...

[KGIII]

> crazy talk about pushing awk through python

> oh! I wrote a tool to do that!

sniffles

That might just be my favorite HN exchange ever. Y'all remind me of emacs users. Between this and the unusual number of Perl mentions on HN today, my cockles are suitably heated.

That is a compliment. Nary a day passes where HN doesn't give me a reason to keep clicking links and learning.

I started off giggling and now I'm moved from my tablet to a laptop so that I can investigate your shutit - as it looks like a handy tool for learning. The scales look the most interesting.

I have been here for a while, but only recently (past couple of months) decided to comment. I lurked for like 12 months, just to see if I'd fit in. Why? HN continually has commentary about things I haven't yet learned.

In short, this is my awkward attempt to thank you. I'll be spending the afternoon trying to enjoy your shutit scales.

[zwischenzug]

Great, thanks!

You can find more info here on my blog:

https://zwischenzugs.wordpress.com/

do ping me with your experience.

[Xophmeister]

No, of course not, but it’s way easier in Bash because of the first-class-ness of commands. In Python, you’d have to mess about with the subprocess module, etc.

[zdkl]

I guess it comes down to which school of wizardy you went to. I'd rather muck around in python, if only because then I wouldn't dread rereading/editing the whole thing a couple months later.