[arp242]

I encountered bugs and had to fix glaring problems in shell scripts literally everywhere I worked.

Most devs are not deeply steeped in Unix, and don't really know what they're doing with this as it's not their main job. They kinda clobber something together that "kinda works" – right up to the point it doesn't.

There is no shame in that; I do that with some stuff too – we all do – because there is no point learning something in-depth if you use it once a year. This is not a "zomg devs are stoopid" rant, it's just an observation of fact.

I've written tons of shell scripts and and I love how it enables you to do something useful very quickly in very little code. Last week I hacked together a "ncurses"-type terminal music player in less than 200 lines which actually works fairly well, which I thought wasn't too bad for an evening of work.

But in general I distrust other people's shell scripts, and I found that 9 times out of 10 that's warranted. I tend to push for zsh as it fixes the most egregious footguns and limitations, but there's still plenty of things to do wrong, and the syntax can be unfamiliar.

[mike_d]

> I encountered bugs and had to fix glaring problems in code literally everywhere I worked.

Fixed it for you. This is why they pay us the medium bucks.

[arp242]

Obviously that implies that the problems and bugs were much worse than average.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

Something that “kinda works” actually does work. Fixing the edge case when it is actually a problem may actually save time compared to spending extra time up front on things that might never be a problem.

[arp242]

I should have been clearer about that: but I'm not talking about theoretical edge cases. I'm talking about "I tried to run it and it doesn't work", or worse (e.g wrong behaviour).

Shell scripts are often the peak of "works on my machine".

[CuriouslyC]

The problem mostly stems from the fact that MacOS folks don't have compatible Unix utils to the Linux folks, and the majority of developers are on MacOS but everything deploys on Linux. The easiest way to fix this is to install GNU utils on mac so you're using the same bash and system tools everywhere.

[arp242]

That is one problem, but there are others: assuming things like current working directory, assuming certain tools are installed and failing badly when it's not (e.g. doesn't do anything but no error, has the wrong behaviour and no warning), and things like that.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

I’d agree: every critical shell script should work in all the places it currently needs to run. But, I think it’s reasonable to iterate here towards perfection: every time a new employee shows up or new environment comes up is a chance to uncover these problems and fix them.

[syndicatedjelly]

Waiting for edge cases to break something, when a solution is known, is a symptom of lousy engineering culture.

[fiddlerwoaroof]

There’s a balance here between solving the problem you actually have (YAGNI) and responsible engineering. Obviously you should test that your code works as expected in all the current environments but, sometimes, ensuring that all the edge cases are handled is just over-engineering.