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by kh_hk 147 days ago
Well, at least I will be able to run my bash scripts in 5 years
5 comments

I don't know Ruby, but chances are that your Python/JavaScript scripts are going to run in 5 years as well, if you stick to standard library.
Just don't use any NPM libraries (if possible) and you'll be fine. I personally wouldn't use typescript for this sort of thing.
Why not? You can have bun or even node these days run it directly.
I've been using node for a decade now and I've had to update NPM libraries a number of times as Node itself upgraded. I have a feeling it will get a lot more stable with ESM and the maturity of the language but if you're writing something you need to run 5-10yrs from now I wouldn't touch a library unless it's simple and has few of it's own dependencies.
Deno has used ESM from the beginning and it’s required on jsr.io. I agree about avoiding dependencies, but maybe it’s okay if they’re locked to a specific version.
and then your mamba changes
What's that even mean
no one knows what it means, but it's provocative!!
Fair. My bash scripts only broke 3 times over the years:

- when ls started quoting filenames with spaces (add -N)

- when perl stopped being installed by default in CentOS and AlmaLinux (had to add dnf install -y perl)

- when egrep alias disappeared (use grep -E)

>- when ls started quoting filenames with spaces (add -N)

Your fault: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs

Kinda tells you everything you need to know about the design of the system when using it the default way is utterly unsafe.
I consider luajit a much better choice than bash if both maintainability and longterm stability are valued. It compiles from source in about 5 seconds on a seven year old laptop and only uses c99, which I expect to last basically indefinitely.
Bash is not a great cross-platform choice. Too many subtle differences.

The best way is a scripting language with locked-down dependency spec inside the script. Weirdly .NET is leading the way here.

Stick to posix shell and it will run anywhere and on anything no matter how old.
Python with uv seems decent in here too.
python does EOL releases after 5 years. I guess versions are readily available for downloading and running with uv, but at that point you are on your own.

bash is glue and for me, glue code must survive the passage of time. The moment you use a high-level language for glue code it stops being glue code.

Hard disagree... I find that Deno shebangs and using fixed version dependencies to be REALLY reliable... I mean Deno 3 may come along and some internals may break, but that should have really limited side effects.

Aside: I am somewhat disappointed that the @std guys don't (re)implement some of the bits that are part of Deno or node compatibility in a consistent way, as it would/could/should be more stable over time.

I like Deno/TS slightly more because my package/library and version can be called directly in the script I'm executing, not a separate .csproj file.

>Too many subtle differences.

Such as?

How is any of that a subtle difference between platforms?
The tools you will call from your bash script differ in subtle ways between Linux, macOS, MinGW.

One good example is `uuidgen`

>uuidgen

That's neither a standard CLI utility nor a bash builtin.

Technically maybe, I don't know. But in practice, your bash will use tools like this and break if they are different / missing on a future build host.

If using a programming language with locked-down package dependencies, then all you need is the compiler/interpreter and your script will work.

For some quality of "run", because I'm hella sure that it has quite a few serious bugs no matter what, starting from escapes or just a folder being empty/having files unlike when it was written, causing it to break in a completely unintelligible way.
I guess we have wildly different expectatives of what a language is responsible for and what not.