BASH as a Modern Programming Language [ppt]

http://cdn.oreillystatic.com/en/assets/1/event/95/BASH%20as%20a%20Modern%20Programming%20Language%20Presentation%201.ppt

by triberian • 13 years ago

55 51 13 years ago

cdn.oreillystatic.com

quarterto• 13 years ago

.ppt? Really? Is this not available in any other format?

antihero• 13 years ago

Ironic, what with claiming to be "modern".

ushi• 13 years ago

I agree! Can someone upload a pdf please? I cant open ppt at the moment.

EDIT: http://www.viewdocsonline.com/document/b37ou4

triberian• 13 years ago

Pdf available at http://digital-era.net/bash-as-a-modern-programming-language...

smharris65• 13 years ago

Google docs can convert it.

pasbesoin• 13 years ago

You can still use the Google viewer functionality without having to log in (i.e. "anonymously"), if you toss the original URL into the right Google URL. I don't have that particular Google URL (prefix) noted on this machine.

P.S. Here's another way to get at it, and what look to be links to pages with further details.

https://docs.google.com/viewer

https://www.google.com/#q=google+viewer+URL

http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.oreillyst...

chattoraj2• 13 years ago

It isn't satire.

tobiasu• 13 years ago

But it should be.

gcr• 13 years ago

Why?

The whole nature of this site is about stretching things beyond their limits.

dmytrish2• 13 years ago

Oh please, don't get me started on this.

Bash is much more powerful than it's usually thought of (I wrote a decent chunk of bash code, there are middle-sized projects like DKMS written in bash, etc), but still it's a language for a narrow niche (file-management and gluing other tools) with a lot of limitations:

- very weak data structures support: no trees, no decent maps (`declare -A` seems to be searched in linear time), no arrays-in-arrays;

- no typing at all, everything is a string;

- it does not have a complete standard, very much behavior is implementation-specific;

- heavy dependence on external tools (they're like libraries in modern languages);

- stunning amount of pitfalls in syntax and corner cases, escaping hell (e.g.: `scp host:"File\\ name\\ with\\ spaces" .`).

Although I have to say that multiple jobs orchestration is amazing for a language from 70ths.

TheCondor• 13 years ago

The syntax corner cases are the killer, hard to debug in some cases too. And it's really really slow...

I know there would be religion issues but I'm sort of surprised there isn't a dsl and repl loop shell in ruby or python or even node that hasn't taken hold among hipsters.

dmytrish2• 13 years ago

Bash/sh/zsh family is brilliant at intense interaction with humans. Aliases, short built-in commands, oneliner-oriented nature, keyboard ergonomics, really concise file/process handling - all of this makes it _the shell_.

I think it's hard for a language to be both suited for interactive and scripting programming, Python/Ruby/Node explicitly are languages for "heavy" scripting, they're poor choices for spending all day long with in a shell. Conciseness and obscurity of bash makes it a poor choice for "heavy" scripting. Also I think that Perl would be a nice shell and maybe that's why it's so often blamed for write-only code.

lhgaghl• 13 years ago

- very weak data structures support - no typing at all, everything is a string - it does not have a complete standard - stunning amount of pitfalls in syntax and corner cases, escaping hell

Sounds like the next JS. I better create Node.sh before anyone else thinks of it so I get all the credit.

networked2• 13 years ago

Why BASH instead of another programming language?
Is the default shell for all OSs except for Windows

BSD users would very much disagree, as would embedded Linux users and others. In fact, this assumption is a very common cause of portability problems for free and open source software.

I'm as guilty as anyone of assuming every shell is bash but when I had to make my software compile and run tests on both Linux and FreeBSD straight out of the repository I discovered that targeting the POSIX shell was not as limiting as you might think. I have since made it a habit to avoid "bashisms" in most scripts; a good way to start with that is to learn what is and isn't a bashism using a handy list found at http://mywiki.wooledge.org/Bashism.

Avshalom• 13 years ago

I don't think it's true of anything but OSX and most desktop linux-en. Solaris, hp-ux, AIX use(d) ksh, QNX too I think.

mitchty3• 13 years ago

Even for OSX its kinda iffy as statements go. I think (been a while now) tcsh was the default for < 10.3, 10.3 was zsh and maybe 10.4, then it moved to /bin/bash as default shell.

frou_dh2• 13 years ago

I wish there was a linter to check shell scripts for non-POSIX syntax and command invocations.

I'm put off trying to really grok *sh scripting because the landscape seems a bit of a confusing mess.

networked2• 13 years ago

Give checkbashisms a look. You can install it on Debian and its derivatives with

    sudo apt-get install devscripts

Edit: It's a bit hard to find a current checkbashisms version on the Web (the one on SourceForge is an abandoned fork of an older version), so I've uploaded a recent stable one to http://pastebin.com/Ncu6DRuM. If you're not on Debian and decide to keep it clone git://anonscm.debian.org/collab-maint/devscripts.git.

profquail2• 13 years ago

Agreed. Many/most of the shell scripts I've ever seen using 'bash' could be using the standard 'sh' instead; most need no changes at all, and the rest need just a few minor tweaks to eliminate non-POSIX-compliant behavior.

Since Debian and other distros now use the BSD-licensed `dash` as their default system shell (system, not user) I suspect they've become more motivated to reduce unnecessary bashisms in shell scripts. Debian's 'devscripts'[1] project includes a Perl script called 'checkbashisms'[2] which you can use to detect many of these common 'bashisms'.

For those of you running Ubuntu, you can install 'devscripts' with apt-get: sudo apt-get install devscripts

For those of you running FreeBSD, you can install 'devscripts' from the devel/devscripts port.

[1] http://packages.qa.debian.org/d/devscripts.html

[2] http://anonscm.debian.org/gitweb/?p=collab-maint/devscripts....

poobrains• 13 years ago

There's no FreeBSD port called "devscripts", perhaps you meant devel/checkbashisms

e40• 13 years ago

Even if not the default shell on BSD, is bash available (by default)?

clarry• 13 years ago

It can be installed via ports or packages.

tedunangst• 13 years ago

By default, no. Installable, yes.

Installed in /bin/bash? No as well. Don't start portable scripts with #!/bin/bash.

weland• 13 years ago

What the...

1. Bash is definitely not the default OS shell for "all OSs" except Windows. Most Android devices, most embedded devices running a variation of Linux, a lot of Unix systems and increasingly more desktop Linux systems don't run bash as a default.

2. Pretty much every shell invokes a myriad of native binaries. That's kind of what a shell does. cmd.exe does that just as easy as bash does.

Don't get me wrong, bash is nice, but the opening part of this presentation is bullshit. Also, what the fuck happened to O'Reilly?

alisnic• 13 years ago

Sounds like a 1st april headline. If this article is accurate, it stretches the "Modern" qualification way too far far

jdkanani• 13 years ago

Can somebody add `[ppt]` tag to title? I can't as I don't have enough points.

luikore• 13 years ago

Bash sucks at slicing arrays (always need a `[@]`):

    ${array[@]:$from:$to}

Zsh is a bit nicer:

    ${array:$from:$to}

kps2• 13 years ago

In Bourne-descended shells, as an unfortunate historical accident, if FOO is an array, then referring to FOO without a subscript is equivalent to referring to its zeroth element.

For your example,

  ${array:$from:$to}

is equivalent to

  ${array[0]:$from:$to}

And likewise

  $ FOO=(a b c d)
  $ FOO=x
  $ echo ${FOO}
  x
  $ echo ${FOO[@]}
  x b c d

kps2• 13 years ago

Nearly everything in the slides can be done in portable POSIX sh(1) with only minor syntactic changes to avoid bashisms.

If you really want a big shell with more language features, check out ol' AT&T ksh¹, with things like nestable structured types and floating point arithmetic. [EDIT: and 'call by reference' using variable names, to address the problem of returning or mutating complicated things.] Some of bash's features originated in ksh, as did most of the POSIX sh features added since original sh.

(1) http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/idx/shell.ht... ¹ http://kornshell.org/

wooby• 13 years ago

Bash has many features and for me has been useful to know because it's almost everywhere, but it was never designed to be what it has become. I'm working on escaping it forever with gherkin, a Lisp I wrote in Bash 4.

gherkin is still in its early days, but if you're interested in such a thing see https://github.com/alandipert/gherkin or join us in #gherkin on freenode.

Siecje• 13 years ago

I use fish instead of bash, it is pretty awesome.

hercynium• 13 years ago

For an interesting take on "Modern Bash" I came across this a few months ago, from the deliciously twisted genius that is Ingy döt Net: https://github.com/ingydotnet/bpan-bash

asmman1• 13 years ago

Moderna bash/shell language? check out Window's Power Shell [1]. The one shell scripting language what I would use and the only of its type that its syntax don't scare me...

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_PowerShell

JIghtuse• 13 years ago

build && run_tests

PowerShell analogue

(build) -and (run_tests)

Really? Embracing commands for simple sequence?

freiervogel• 13 years ago

Simple sequence would just be: build; run_tests

The syntax you quoted is doing a logical AND of two expressions. Expressions are any bit of script - including calls to executables (like the example).

It's a pity that PowerShell is Windows-only (Pash notwithstanding); its syntax is small, supports pithiness and verbosity equally well, and has an easy to understand flow once you're over the first learning hump.

gwu783• 13 years ago

Why do "modern programming languages" return 0 for true? APL returns 1.

tjgq• 13 years ago

I know you jest, but the reason why shell programming uses 0 for success is understandable: that way you can have distinct non-zero returns for different kinds of errors (and several Unix utilities do have them). Arguably, testing for non-zero is a more satisfying idiom than testing for "non-one".

gwu783• 13 years ago

Thanks.

Are you saying that the shell (or C or assembly) is a language closely tied to a system, e.g., a CPU, a kernel and utilities - a system that can produce various types of errors?

Whereas APL is not tied to such a system, other than mathematics?

panzi3• 13 years ago

My experience with bash: Once you do something a bit more complex where bashisms would be handy any shell is so slow and complicated to use that you're better of with Python, even if all your system provides is Python 2.4. And Python is pre-installed under every (non-embedded) Linux distribution I've seen and also on Mac OS X.

Python is more powerful than shells but at the same time has a much simpler syntax (much less to remember). The only thing I miss in Python sometimes is how easy you can do complex piping in shells. It's possible in Python but not at all as handy as in (ba)sh.

panzi3• 13 years ago

Ah, also FreeBSD, Solaris and probably many other Unix (like) operating systems have Python pre-installed.

malandrew• 13 years ago

Can you upload this to slideshare or something? Many people despise ppt files.

BASH as a Modern Programming Language [ppt]

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