Hacker News Reader

Comment by okamiueru | Hacker News Reader

If you're running scripts, what difference does it make that you use fish? You're not really supposed to write scripts for fish, unless it is meant to be used be the fish shell itself. A shebang on the top of your script will invoke the script with the right executable, and whether you called it from bash, zsh or fish would make no difference.

View on HN

So, instead of just typing shell commands, you type something else, but as soon as you need a shell script, you have to go back to shell commands.... Why not just cut out the middleman?

Answer to the first question: yes. Answer to the second question: because bash is a rather poor terminal shell.

In my experience, the middleman you mention doesn't exist. Or, if anything, it is a very tiny man that hardly gets in the way. It's either a one-liner with a syntax change you can pick up in 5 minutes, or it falls under any combination of these:

- might as well belong in a script

- the complicated stuff is in awk or the likes

- you can just enter bash for any copy-pasted bashisms

- you can execute it explicitly with bash -c

In any case, none enough of a hassle that it could demerit the immense productivity benefit I've gotten from fish. The only regret I have on that matter is not having ditched it sooner. Use bash to run scripts, or even better, sh. Use a different shell to make your life on the terminal better. Doesn't need to be fish, zsh is pretty good too.

If I can offer any advice: if you still want to stick with bash, at the very least take a look at fzf, https://github.com/junegunn/fzf , aside from fish/zsh it's the best and most lowest hanging fruit.

I personally use zsh, bash is too primitive with regards to its user interface (line editing, searching, vi keys, etc.) The syntax however is my key point here, I often take my commands and smack them into Makefiles for example.

> You're not really supposed to write scripts for fish

Given that 95% of my time in a shell is running a script, a shell that doesn't do that well isn't a great fit for me.

> A shebang on the top of your script will invoke the script with the right executable,

Assuming the person who wrote it had the foresight to do so. That person isn't always me, and if I have to manually check if each script I run has a shebang, I should just default to running them in bash.

I haven’t seen a shell script in ages that was missing the shebang. Is this common in some places?

I’ve started to write dash scripts because that seems to be reasonably posix and bash on macOS is ancient.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a script written without the shebang.

Btw, you can get around the ancient bash in macOS by installing a more modern bash and invoking with /usr/bin/env bash as your shebang. Not sure if that’s a great idea, mind you, but if you’re already writing scripts in something non-portable, it’s an option.

There are hundreds of sh files on github that don't have a shebang. Just because you don't write them and your colleagues don't doesn't mean they don't exist in the wild.

I didn’t mean to imply that they didn’t exist nor that it might not be important to account for them in some contexts. I meant only to convey my own personal experience: that it had never occurred to me that I might need to account for a missing shebang, since providing an interpreter for a script via shebang is all I have ever personally encountered.

wait how does the OS even invoke an interpreter without a shebang? If you have to explicitly call an interpreter when you invoke it, then it's no extra work to call

    bash some_script.sh

anyway

As I’ve learned in response to this thread, apparently some (but not all) Unixy OSes will run a file marked as executable using /bin/sh if no shebang is supplied.

Oh right, I think that's part of how APE[1] works. But I thought the Thompson shell was old and weird, and that it might not support what people use when they write ‘POSIX’ shell scripts nowadays.

Anyway it sounds like in that case the OS _doesn't_ know how to run the script, it just assumes `/bin/sh` will do.

I always assumed that scripts without an interpreter line were like snippets to be invoked via `source`, from some shell script with knowledge of the context in which it should be used.

Anyway, if that's the way it works, the behavior actually isn't a problem for users of Nushell or Elvish or Fish or anything else, since their executables are never installed to `/bin/sh` anyway. Nushell probably gets installed to `/usr/bin/nu`, Fish to `/usr/bin/fish`, and `elvish` can be installed anywhere. So it's still not clear that there's a real problem with un-shebanged scripts when it comes to using a boutique shell for login.

—

1: https://justine.lol/ape.html

Yeah thing $T _might_ (but probably won’t) happen, so the idea is automatically terrible.

Any random blog post that you find with instructions to run something in a shell that uses a variable just won't work copy and pasted, you now need to either modify them for your esoteric shell, or wrap them in a script to be ran through bash

I would consider a person who doesn't use a shebang to be bad at their jobs.

Even the most basic of tutorials will include it even if it means nothing to the user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com