I have a confession to make: Unless shell script is absolutely required, I just use Python for all my automation needs.
Bash was the first language I learned, got pretty decent at it. Now what happens is I think of a tiny script I need to write, I start writing it in Bash, I have to do string manipulation, I say fuck this shit and rewrite in Python lol
Regex
Edit: to everyone who responded, I use regex infrequently enough that the knowledge never really crystalizes. By the time I need it for this one thing again, I haven’t touched it in like a year.
You get used to it, I don’t even see the code—I just see: group… pattern… read-ahead…
Don’t let the gatekeepers keep you out. This site helps.
No. Learn it properly once and you’re good. Also it’s super handy in vim.
interns gonna intern
You always forget regex syntax?
I’ve always found it simple to understand and remember. Even over many years and decades, I’ve never had issues reading or writing simple regex syntax (excluding the flags and shorthands) even after long regex breaks.
It’s not about the syntax itself, it’s about which syntax to use. There are different ones and remembering which one is for which language is tough.
This is exactly it. Regex is super simple. The difficulty is maintaining a mental mapping between language/util <-> regex engine <-> engine syntax & character class names. It gets worse when utils also conditionally enable extended syntaxes with flags or options.
The hardest part is remembering whether you need to use
\wor[:alnum:].Way too few utils actually mention which syntax they use too. Most just say something accepts a “regular expression”, which is totally ambiguous.
Most of regex is pretty basic and easy to learn, it’s the look ahead and look behind that are the killers imo
PSA: Run ShellCheck on your shell scripts. It turns up a shocking number of programming errors. https://www.shellcheck.net/
Thank you for this. About a year ago I came across ShellCheck thanks to a comment just like this on Reddit. I also happened to be getting towards the end of a project which included hundreds of lines of shell scripts across dozens of files.
It turns out that despite my workplace having done quite a bit of shell scripting for previous projects, no one had heard about Shell Check. We had been using similar analysis tools for other languages but nothing for shell scripts. As you say, it turned up a huge number of errors, including some pretty spicy ones when we first started using it. It was genuinely surprising to see how many unique and terrible ways the scripts could have failed.
I still have to look up the exact syntax of ifs and whiles.
I’ve coded in bash for a while
Ever since I switched to Fish Shell, I’ve had no issues remembering anything. Ported my entire catalogue of custom scripts over to fish and everything became much cleaner. More legible, and less code to accomplish the same things. Easier argument parsing, control structures, everything. Much less error prone IMO.
Highly recommend it. It’s obviously not POSIX or anything, but I find that the cost of installing fish on every machine I own is lower than maintaining POSIX-compliant scripts.
Enjoy your scripting!
every control structure should end in the backwards spelling of how they started
Once you get used to it it is kind of fun.
Shame about
dothough.it could have been
notsince there’s notry.
There’s always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: “If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you’ll wish you wrote it in a real programming language.”
I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like “Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell.” …around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It’s no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It’s got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.
I consider python a scripting language too.
They’re all programming languages, they all have their places.
Je comprend tellement! Je répond en français pour ma première réponse sur Lemmy juste pour voir comment ça va être géré!
Si yo también comprendo, qué necesidad de comentar todo el tiempo en anglais?
En un mundo ideal. Todo se traduciría automáticamente del idioma original al idioma del lector y viceversa
¿No nos volvería lentos y flojonazos? (not a real word if you translate, more like slang meaning to be really lazy)
Clearly you don’t write enough bash scripts.
Or scripts for basically any other variant of the Bourne shell. They are, for the most part, very cross compatible.
That’s the only reason I’ve ever done much of anything in shell script. As a network administrator I’ve worked many network appliances running on some flavor of Unix and the one language I can count on to be always available is bash. It has been well worth knowing for just that reason.
Maybe applies more to regex, the write only language.
The copy paste language. AI writes better regex than I do
and you won’t get better if you use ai for it
Meh I rarely use it. Even if I don’t use AI I wouldn’t get better at it, since I will forget everything the next time I will use it.
i used powershell, and even after trying every other shell and as a die hard Linux user I’ve considered going back to powershell cause damn man
I am a huge fan of using PowerShell for scripting on Linux. I use it a ton on Windows already and it allows me to write damn near cross-platform scripts with no extra effort. I still usually use a Bash or Fish shell but for scripting I love being able to utilize powershell.
I don’t normally say this, but the AI tools I’ve used to help me write bash were pretty much spot on.
Yes, with respect to the grey bearded uncles and aunties; as someone who never “learned” bash, in 2025 I’m letting a LLM do the bashing for me.
Until the magic incantations you don’t bother to understand don’t actually do what you think they’re doing.
Sounds like a problem for future me. That guy hates me lol
Yeah fuck that guy
