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Explore some of the more useful but perhaps more esoteric capabilities of the Bash shell with the blog post Ten More Things I Wish I'd Known About bash. It is a followup to the highly visible post by the same author on Ten Things I Wish I'd Known About bash. Modern shells like Bash, Ksh, and Zsh have over four decades of developent and refinement, making them powerful, flexlble, and fast user interfaces for efficient work — not just excellent scripting languages for automation.
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Ten *More* Things I Wish I’d Known About bash
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Cum tacent, clamant. When they are silent, they shout. -Cicero
(Score: 2) by Rich on Tuesday January 23 2018, @03:05PM (5 children)
...starts with the same two letters as "shell". There you have it. That's what shells with their scripting are. UNIX shell acts completely unpredictable to someone who has not used it daily for years. And if someone is made to use it daily for years, it's a waste of development resources that couldn't be matched in late-stage socialist countries.
(Score: 4, Touché) by turgid on Tuesday January 23 2018, @03:25PM (3 children)
This level of ignorance ensures that there will always be gainful employment for those who can give the illusion of working magic.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rich on Tuesday January 23 2018, @07:21PM (2 children)
The leper in a leper colony will regard leprosy as something perfectly normal. It's not that shell magic is not understandable, just as leprosy is well understood by those with medical knowledge. (Also remember the scene in "Princess Mononoke", where Lady Eboshi employs the lepers as gunsmiths, very useful! ... :P)
Shell is just uneconomical, or at least annoying, to get right, because its expressive basics are fundamentally broken. How often did I come across scripts that broke with spaces in filenames? And it gets especially bad, if the target has to be classical "sh", without "ba", "z", "k" or "da" in front of it.
I, for one, much prefer Python as digital duck tape.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Tuesday January 23 2018, @07:40PM
Spaces in file names are an abomination. Anyone who puts spaces in file names is a filthy pervert. The Good Lord gave us the underscore.
It helps to know what language you're writing in when you try to write a program.
Youth, as the great man said, is wasted on the young. Quack.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Tuesday January 23 2018, @10:07PM
> How often did I come across scripts that broke with spaces in filenames?
How often did you get STDs from unprotected sex with popular prostitutes?
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday January 24 2018, @12:16AM
If that was really how the term "shell" was derived, it makes it a portmanteau of "shit" and "hell".
Could be worse. Could have been a bit of oil company propaganda, I mean, imagine if the languages Perl, Python, and PHP were instead named Chevron, Exxon, and BP.