Bash scripts should only be used for quick and dirty tasks where brevity is a major benefit. Don’t pretend bash can be readable and maintainable. If you want that use another language that sacrifices brevity for clarity.
Bash scripts should only be used for quick and dirty tasks where brevity is a major benefit. Don’t pretend bash can be readable and maintainable. If you want that use another language that sacrifices brevity for clarity.
First I agree that bash scripts should only be used for quick or small (& ultimately mostly personal unshared) tasks. There's absolutely no need for it to be either "dirty", & as mentioned in my post, brevity has no material benefit in this context.
I want my personal local utility/productivity scripts to be readable: quick to write & quick to modify on the fly. Brevity doesn't help here - wpm optimises for natural language typing & that translates better to idiomatic logical block structures than to symbol-heavy one-liners.
I also want the same for the small bash snippets in my CI jobs - this is a particular example where brevity is actively bad: this encourages folk to inline their bash snippets in yaml (no syntax highlighting & unlintable) when they should be packaged in script files in CI directories.