Imagine a world where Bash supports JSON.

http://qaa.ath.cx/TheEmperorsNewClothes.html?

by e1ven • 15 years ago

102 49 15 years ago

qaa.ath.cx

Number one thing I learned from this -- don't write code in bash ...

e1ven2• 15 years ago

Oh, Man, I can't agree. I LOVE using bash for quick scripting, because I can use the same commands I use when I run them in the shell.

Doing a quick

  for i in `seq 1 15`; do ssh www$i.website.com "reboot"; done

is VERY convenient. It's fast, quick to write, and extends existing shell knowledge.

This would be very useful in all sorts of sysadmin places.

Imaging that I wrote a quick server, in Python/Rails/Node/whathaveyou, that accepted input, then returned a formatted JSON array with server info.

Now, I can do

  $SERVERLIST = `curl http://my-server/list-of-servers`
  for i in ```$SERVERLIST.webservers.list()```; do ssh $i "reboot"; done
  for i in ```$SERVERLIST.dbservers.list()```; do ssh $i "uptime" >> serverload.txt; done

viraptor2• 15 years ago

Have a look at fabric - it makes things like that pretty simple. Also agreeing bash is not a language for serious coding.

_ea1k• 15 years ago

I've found that Perl works even better for this.

my @allfiles = `ls /somedir/`; for my $file (@allfiles) { chomp $file; ... }

Is a wonderful thing. It's not pretty Perl, but it's still better than Bash, IMO.

davvid• 15 years ago

Doing a quick [...] is VERY convenient.

I agree! If you do this a lot then you might be interested in GNU parallel. It's super handy!

    seq 1 15 | parallel ssh www{}.website.com reboot

http://www.gnu.org/s/parallel/

mattbillenstein2• 15 years ago

I write tons of little mostly throwaway scripts in bash/sed/awk/etc. But I never had a bash script that grew to reasonable complexity that I wish I hadn't just started in Python.

Each tool has a purpose -- I don't think mucking around with json is particularly suitable for bash...

Craiggybear• 15 years ago

If you don't feel comfortable in Bash, maybe *nix ain't for you.

jrockway• 15 years ago

You are traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination.

Prepare to enter... the scary door.

troels• 15 years ago

Indeed :) In which case, you'd love this: http://www.debian-administration.org/article/A_web_server_in...

jacquesm• 15 years ago

Be sure to allow prefixes of ../.. for interesting files.

Rusky• 15 years ago

Or an IRC bot: https://github.com/rpjohnst/markbot :)

sramov• 15 years ago

https://github.com/rcrowley/json.sh

figital• 15 years ago

jsawk : https://github.com/micha/jsawk

catshirt• 15 years ago

and a slimmer tool inspired by jsawk (in node) https://gist.github.com/1053262

aidenn0• 15 years ago

This violates my number one rule of shell scripting:

Don't use symmetrical quotes

harbud2• 15 years ago

So you never use 'single' and "double" quotes?

jneen• 15 years ago

I'd like to see a language that's as easy to use on the shell as bash (optional quoting, chaining, etc), but is as powerful as the more general-purpose scripting languages (Ruby/Python/TCL/Perl/etc). If no such thing exists I think I'm gonna try designing one.

e1ven2• 15 years ago

Wasn't that sort of the original design spec for perl?

webjprgm• 15 years ago

Agreed. Besides Perl, you can also use Ruby and PHP just as easily. At least that works for me. The main selling point is the ability to run shell commands with `command here`. I exclude Python from my list because you have to use the subprocess module, which makes it more complicated.

joelthelion• 15 years ago

It doesn't exist, and yes, it would be very useful.

LeafStorm• 15 years ago

I am working on a design for one as well. It's rather tricky, because there are a lot of things you have to balance in order to get a well-designed programming language, especially when you want it to be usable for the sort of things shell scripting is good at, because shell as it exists is basically the opposite of a well-designed programming language and is only popular because it got here first.

geophile• 15 years ago

Check out Object Shell: http://geophile.com/osh.

It takes the idea of commands and pipes, but is oriented around python objects. Usable from the command line, and also has a python API.

It includes integration with the OS (e.g. commands to get files and processes as python objects), databases, remote nodes, and combinations of these, (E.g. submit a query to all nodes in a cluster, pull back the results and integrate them.)

I developed and used this tool while developing a sharded system running on a cluster of nodes with postgres running on each.

Object Shell is GPL. See the page above for examples, documentation and downloads.

groovy2shoes• 15 years ago

There's always Scheme Shell: http://www.scsh.net/

philjackson• 15 years ago

Non-interactive and unmaintained, unfortunately.

ashayh• 15 years ago

Things like this can be very useful on servers where its not possible to install any Json parsing libraries.

iso8859-1• 15 years ago

What do you mean? Using Python you can just place the library direction in the working directory of your script. I don't see how this library is different from any other library for other languages.

tlrobinson• 15 years ago

Or XML! https://gist.github.com/1074339

manojlds• 15 years ago

Powershell does! :)

itgoon• 15 years ago

Yup. Posh ended my habit of installing cygwin, and now I cringe when I have to do it the "old-fashioned" way on a Linux box.

Powershell is more verbose, but much more expressive.

wavephorm2• 15 years ago

At that point why not just write your scripts in Javascript, and run them with nodejs?

gord2• 15 years ago

absolutely... Im imagining a 100% javascript shell. 'jash' ?

node.js is great for all those perl-y 1 to 10 liners. It should be the shell.

wavephorm2• 15 years ago

Maybe not a shell, but for simple scripts you can save your js code with the following at the top:

  #!/usr/bin/env node

Then save the file as "myscript" and run it as any other executable. Node already has a repl for experimentation.

jes5199• 15 years ago

This is a start, but I'd like all my unix utils to input and output structured data instead of walls of text

mhansen• 15 years ago

Jsonpipe is excellent for this. It makes json greppable by putting every piece if data on a new line with its key.

  $ echo '{"a": 1, "b": 2}' | jsonpipe 
  / {} 
  /a 1 
  /b 2 
  $ echo '["foo", "bar", "baz"]' | jsonpipe 
  / [] 
  /0 "foo" 
  /1 "bar" 
  /2 "baz"

https://github.com/dvxhouse/jsonpipe

a3_nm• 15 years ago

A similar tool: http://kmkeen.com/jshon/

druiid• 15 years ago

There are code modifications to bash to use PCRE and MySQL contexts. I mean, these modifications are great and all... but I have yet to see the real point behind them until they come standard in any distribution. Before that, they are just play-toys since they are non-standard... IMHO.

harbud2• 15 years ago

I'd rather see an extensible quoting syntax a la Postgres' pl/pgSQL, e.g. ``j` {"a": 1}``. When you want to support YAML: ``y` {a: 1}``.

pak• 15 years ago

Wow. I was wondering how the hell TickTick.sh "extended" the bash interpreter grammar, because there is no obvious way to do that. The key is on lines 171-189:

    awk -F '``' '{\
    
      # ... jibbery awk-ese ...
    
    }' `caller 1 | cut -d ' ' -f 3` | sed "s/^/S/g;s/$/E/g" | __tick_fun_parse | bash

    exit

So what this is doing, by Jove, is using the "caller" bash builtin + "cut" to print out the filename of the currently executing script, pass that as an argument to awk, and use awk + sed + the "__tick_fun_parse" function to re-parse the script into something that can actually be executed by bash. The "exit" command then exits the current run-through of the script, because otherwise it will reach all the stuff that would normally cause a syntax error.

This is legit hax.

tszming• 15 years ago

Don't waste your time on this, as the author said:

"Note: This is just a fun hack. You may want to consider using mature languages like Ruby or Perl to solve actual real life problems. Oh who am I kidding, I use whitespace and brainfuck every day."

Imagine a world where Bash supports JSON.

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