[jahsome]

When it comes to shell scripting, I personally avoid golf at all costs. I'll take an extra verbose, easy script to parse (for a human) any day of the week when it comes to operations.

Yes it's a tradeoff. Every line of code is a liability. Powershell or python are probably "slower" which in my use case is negligible and almost never relevant. On the other hand, I can't help but view the often esoteric and obscurely clever bash mechanisms as debt.

[latexr]

I’m not talking about code golf. Verbosity and clarity are not directly correlated. The examples I’m talking about are also often easier to read as shell scripts.

For example, let’s take a file as input, filter for every "mypattern" line, then output them sorted.

Python example:

  import sys
  print(*sorted(line for line in open(sys.argv[1]) if 'mypattern' in line), sep='')

Shell example:

  grep 'mypattern' "${1}" | sort

The shell version is shorter, easier to read, easier to understand, easier to search for, and an order of magnitude faster. You can certainly make the Python version more verbose, yet it’ll never reach the same level of clarity and immediacy as the shell version.