Comment by heydonovan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heydonovan | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Just about everything I've learned about bash has been from the #bash IRC channel on Freenode. You'll see the same repeated warnings of not learning from the public web, due to the fact that misinformation spreads like a wild fire, and some articles out there are just flat out wrong (sort of like w3schools in the #css circle).

There is just one thing I will never understand. The tired argument of "...but it isn't portable". Features that are new, and make programming bash easier (such as "[" vs "[["), are looked down upon in some circles because it isn't portable. If I'm programming for bash, then upon deployment, I'll be using bash. To use another shell, and hope it just works is a bit insane.

I'd also like to second using the Fish shell. Far better than bash/zsh for everyday use, and I just can't go back to other shells.

Seconded. I can't live without fish, and I hear this "but what about my bash scripts?!" argument a lot. Unless you're actually sourcing the script, it has a magic "#!/bin/bash" line on top that makes it work correctly!

It's not that simple. Changes in the syntax for strings and environmental variables are going to bite precisely newcomers who would benefit the most from fish. And sourcing happens.

I do know that all these problems result from fish having a saner syntax compared to bash (hell, FWIW I'm still mad that globs are not regular expressions and have a different syntax) but everytime someone points out these problems the reaction is "#!/bin/bash", which kinda misses the point.

> upon deployment, I'll be using bash

Unless you're on Ubuntu, in which case you will be using /bin/dash at occasionally entirely unexpected moments.

For the want of a shebang, the core was dumped.

Depends what you're going for, I guess. If it's something you're developing for public use and/or something you want to run on !Linux, portability might be a concern (FreeBSD, for example, doesn't ship with bash and, if you install it, it lands in /usr/local/bin instead of /bin).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com