Ask HN: How many personal shell scripts do you use? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How many personal shell scripts do you use?

2 pointsgreenfella4 comments

I'm just curious how many personal shell scripts people use. Some of my colleagues use none. I have amassed 165 in my Scripts directory. They are mostly bash scripts.

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    centrepoint [jvs] /home/jvs > ls binscripts | wc
        500     500    6555

Wow! A nice round 500. I couldn't have foreseen that. I knew I had a lot, I would have guessed somewhere about 200.

Definitely time I went through them all and started to discard the obsolete ones.

I seem to have about three dozen. Many of them are very simple and quite old and should probably be turned into shell functions in my .bashrc. Only a few are of any complexity.

Why would you favor aliases over scripts? Just wondering.

Mostly efficiency. A typical shell function doesn't spawn a new shell, which running a script would. On a modern system, it's probably irrelevant.

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