[thankthunk]

> Do not write scripts with bash.

It's a bit too late for that. Bash is pretty much the de facto default shell for linux. Telling people not to use bash scripts is like telling web devs not to use javascript or OS devs not to use C.

It may change in the future, but bash is so entrenched, it's going to take an extraordinary use case for people to move from bash.

[orzen]

Bash is nowhere close for being de facto default shell for Linux. This is a bad analogy. In this case it is more like telling people that want to code Javascript to only write it in React. You got to go from something generic to something specific. Scripts written with bash will often rely on bash-specifics and can therefore only be interpreted by bash. There are entire projects dedicated to stop this plague. If you want to write portable shell scripts, use dash.

https://linux.die.net/man/1/checkbashisms https://mywiki.wooledge.org/Bashism https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/bashism

[raarts]

> Bash is nowhere close for being de facto default shell for Linux.

Oh, yes it is. Every important distribution uses bash as the default.

[umanwizard]

Ubuntu has dash as /bin/sh.

[jhasse]

But bash as the login shell.

[gkya]

Login shell means your interactive shell. It does not necessarily mean that that shell should be used for scripting.

[JdeBP]

> It may change in the future, but bash is so entrenched, it's going to take an extraordinary use case for people to move from bash.

You don't know your history. Exactly such a move has already happened once, a decade ago. And it was a success.

* https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2007/07/msg00027.htm...

* http://initscripts-ng.alioth.debian.org/soc2006-bootsystem/b...

* https://wiki.debian.org/BootProcessSpeedup#Using_a_faster_sy...

[moviuro]

bash is completely out of date on macOS (GPL2 vs. GPL3), and not shipped on any *BSD AFAICT.

Some Linux distro don't ship it either (void, alpine IIRC).

And, most of the time, bash is used because people don't know any better, see e.g. https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/pull/8405/files

[falsedan]

> bash is completely out of date on macOS

I love finding and removing all the GNU/Linux-ism in my bash code when I move it from a dev host to my personal laptop. macOS coreutils don't have GNU longopts, surprise!

[umanwizard]

In case you didn't know: if you really need some GNU tool, you can do `brew install coreutils` (assuming you use Homebrew).

The installed binaries will have their names prefixed with `g`; e.g. `gdate` instead of `date`.

If something you want isn't part of coreutils, you can often install it directly; e.g. `brew install gawk` or the weirdly-named `brew install gnu-sed` (which names its installed binary `gsed`... go figure.)

[falsedan]

I know this; but can I teach every potential user of my scripts this same fact through documentation I have to maintain? What if: I write the code so that documenting it is easier?

[gkya]

Quite some people use Zsh interactively.

[Sir_Cmpwn]

>Telling people not to use bash scripts is like telling web devs not to use javascript or OS devs not to use C.

Wow, this comparison is totally whack. Javascript and C are both standardized and the former is the only option when using a web browser.

It's never too late. We managed to get people off of ANSI C and there's a similar amount of difference between ANSI* C and C89 as there is between bash and sh.

* correction: pre-ANSI