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by h4l 709 days ago
Two main situations I think. The first is just interactive use in any shell to encode ad-hoc JSON. If you have a next-gen shell which can handle structured data directly, then you probably don't need it.

Second is situations where you'd rather not add an additional dependency, but bash is pretty much a given. For example, CI environments, scripts in dev environments, container entrypoints. Or things that area already written in bash.

I don't advocate writing massive programs in bash, for sure it's better to turn to a proper language before things get hairy. But bash is just really ubiquitous, and most people who do any UNIX work will be able to deal with a bit of shell script.
2 comments
IshKebab 709 days ago
> Second is situations where you'd rather not add an additional dependency, but bash is pretty much a given. For example, CI environments, scripts in dev environments, container entrypoints. Or things that area already written in bash.

Is this tool not an additional dependency?

> But bash is just really ubiquitous

Biggest crime of the Unix world probably.

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kazinator 707 days ago
> Is this tool not an additional dependency?

"Dependency" generally means "external dependency".

It's only a dependency if your solution's build process fetches it from its upstream repo. (Or worse: it's just mentioned in some manual build instructions as one of the things your solution needs.)

This is small enough to copy into the source tree of your solution, in which case it's no longer a dependency.

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h4l 708 days ago
> Is this tool not an additional dependency?

It is, but if you already have bash, adding another shell script isn't much of a jump. e.g. I'd feel OK about committing jb to another repo for use from a .envrc file to set up an environment, whereas committing a binary would not feel good.

> Biggest crime of the Unix world probably.

Sorry if I'm perpetuating this! :) My take is that problem is not with bash, the problem is that it's hard for more advanced tools to replace it.

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wavemode 709 days ago
I agree with the interactive usecase.

But for when you don't want an extra dependency, awk and perl are better than bash and just about as ubiquitous. (I might dare to say more ubiquitous, since MacOS in particular ships with an ancient version of bash that can't even use this jb tool. But the versions of awk and perl it comes with are fine.)

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