[Steltek]

Shell scripts are the automation and extension of repetitive, tedious manual tasks. Why wouldn't you want to take your shell history and wrap it in some getopt-ish stuff? Or to put it another way, why would you wish to throw away your debugged and working code for a rewrite in another language?

[gbrown]

Shell scripts are one way to do this, but I don’t have a library of shell scripts because I always have access to actual scripting languages.

To each their own, but writing bash scripts that get more complex than moving a few files around and sucks (imho), so I don’t bother.

[Steltek]

You're missing a step. You originally wrote "I don’t see why the shell must be both nice to program in and a concise textual interface."

I attempted to demonstrate how evolving a CLI session into a script is very beneficial. That bash is not great for that purpose is exactly the point of the article. A better shell language would mean not throwing away your organic, working code for a rewrite.

Unless you're trying to say that you rarely use the command line to explore a system and operate mostly through scripts. I think I would burn a lot of time in writing boiler plate when "curl | grep" would do the job for human consumption in less than 50 keystrokes.

[gbrown]

I see what you mean now. I still draw the line differently - I don’t think I’ve ever interactively worked through conditional logic, control loops, or user prompts, so I’d happily make simple bash scripts from basic commands, but I wouldn’t choose to write more complex programs that way.