I used to work for a .NET shop that randomly wrote some automation scripts in bash. The expertise to maintain them long term (and frankly, write them half-decently to begin with) simply wasn't there. Never understood why they didn't just write their tooling in C#.
Maybe this will make it seem like a more viable approach.
Or just use powershell. It has some idiosyncrasies but its a pretty nice platform for scripting
Especially for C# developers. You can use any CLR (e.g. C#) objects in powershell, for prototyping, automation, proof of concept, etc.,.
Here’s the really annoying thing with powershell: it doesn’t have a module distribution model. Like, at all. A csharp script, on the other hand, gets NuGet out of the box.
What is the PowerShellGet module[1] missing? It comes preinstalled in all versions post 5.1 (though 5.1 itself is limited).
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/powershe...
TFW where you're dead wrong and have to upvote everyone who told you so...
False: https://www.powershellgallery.com/
Not only it has modules, there are several NuGet like repos for Powershell.
It is reasonably unlikely that bash scripts are easily replaceable by powershell scripts.
Theres a fair argument that complex scripts require a complex scripting language, but you have to have a good reason to pick powershell.
Typically, on non-windows, there is not one.
Its the same “tier” as bash; the thing you use because its there and then reach past for hard things. The same reason as bash.
Theres no realistic situation I would (and Ive written a lot of powershell) go, “gee, this bash script/makefile is too big and complex, lets rewrite it in powershell!”
To this day, error handling in most Unix shells just sucks. Background commands, pipes, command substitutions, functions, if/while conditions, subshells, etc. are all "special cases" when errors are involved. You can make them suck less but the more you try to handle all the possible ways things can fail, the vastly more complex your code becomes, which the Bourne lineage languages just aren't ergonomically suitable for.
I think PowerShell was totally right to call this out and do it better, even though I don't particularly love the try-catch style of exception handling. False is not an error condition, exceptions are typed, exceptions have messages, etc.
The problem with PowerShell coming from bash etc. is that the authors took one look at Unix shells and ran away screaming. So features that were in the Bourne shell since the late 1970s are missing and the syntax is drastically different for anything non-trivial. Other problems like treating everything as UTF-16 and otherwise mishandling non-PowerShell commands have gotten better though.
Bash is the tool that’s already there; that is always a real good reason to use it.
Dotnet is a pig with its dependencies by comparison.
Sure, but these days so is Python. And you've got a dozen other languages available after a single command. You wouldn't recommend using a kitchen knife instead of a chainsaw to cut down a tree just because it's already there, would you?
Bash has a huge number of footguns, and a rather unusual syntax. It's not a language where you can safely let a junior developer tweak something in a script and expect it to go well. Using a linter like ShellCheck is essentially a hard requirement.
If you're working in a team where 99.9% of the code you're maintaining is C#, having a handful of load-bearing Bash scripts lying around is probably a Really Bad Idea. Just convert it to C# as well and save everyone a lot of trouble.
> Bash has a huge number of footguns, and a rather unusual syntax. It's not a language where you can safely let a junior developer tweak something in a script and expect it to go well.
I'd say as someone who started with shell/bash in ~ 2000 to cater Linux systems, it's quote usual syntax and I believe that's true for many sysadmins.
No way I'd like to deal with opaque .Net or even Go stuff - incapable of doing "bash -x script.sh" while debugging production systems at 3AM. And non production as well - just loosing my time (and team time) on unusual syntax, getting familiar with nuget and ensuring internet access for that repos and pinging ITSec guys to open access to that repos.
> let a junior developer tweak something in a script and expect it to go well
let developers do their job, writing bash scripts is something extraordinary for dev team to do, just because - where they expected to apply it? I can imagine "lonely dev startups" situations only, where it may be reasonably needed
> Bash is the tool that’s already there; that is always a real good reason to use it.
If you are a dotnet dev shop, it is quite likely that dotnet is also a tool that is already there the places you need automation.
Plus, its also the tool that is already there in your team’s skillset.
I am an old hat. I've been in dotnet dev land for decades and still use bash (git bash).
Pros:
Syntax + access to familiar shell commands
Cons:
Bash scripts are not easy to maintain.
Not an old hat. in the dotnet world for 3 years, bash over a decade. Agree with bash not being easy to maintain.
Argument about bash being always there breaks down quickly. Even if you limit yourself to bash+awk+grep, they dont work consistently across different bash flavors or across platforms (mac/win/linuz).
My approach now is to have my programs, in the language most convenient to me, compiled to a bunch of archs and have that run across systems. One time pain, reduces over time.
> Argument about bash being always there breaks down quickly. Even if you limit yourself to bash+awk+grep, they dont work consistently across different bash flavors or across platforms
IMO this is why Perl was invented and you should just use Perl. Bash isn't portable and isn't very safe either. If you're only going to use a couple of commands, there's really no reason to use bash. The usecase, in my head, for bash is using a variety of unix utils. But then those utils aren't portable. Perl is really great here because it's available on pretty much every computer on Earth and is consistent.
Except Windows, of course. You can install it there but it's plainly obvious it's in a foreign environment.
A lot of people focus on Perl's bad reputation as one of the first web languages instead of its actual purpose, a better sh/awk/sed. If you're writing shell scripts Perl's a godsend for anything complex.
I worked at a dotnet shop a few years ago back. We still used bash over powershell unless we required COM
There's still version/dependency hell (one thing wants 6, one thing wants 8, one thing wants 8.1, etc.).
This can be managed but you have to manage it.
(A fanatical commitment to backwards compatibility can make this a lot easier, but it doesn't seem to me that dotnet has that.)
>Dotnet is a pig with its dependencies by comparison.
Dotnet with all dependencies you will get in how much time? In like 6 minutes including all the preparations? So the difference between "already there" and dotnet - is 6 minutes. It's hard to imagine a case where this difference matters.
Its trivial to install a consistent PowerShell environment on the major OSes. Not so for Bash.
If you write to POSIX it's a lot more portable. If you're doing something outside POSIX, it's probably best to use something else, like Perl.
...Or powershell!
Besides, the trick is knowing what is POSIX compliant and portable, and what isn't. A lot of things will almost work.
Knowing stuff is what we're paid for, otherwise we'd all be making minimum wage. Besides, there are plenty of non-bash shell scripting resources out there, which is good to learn if you want to work with the BSDs or proprietary UNIX systems.
Powershell on UNIX is like Perl on Windows. It works, but it's weird and alien. But the same can be said for .NET, really.