this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2024
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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/bin/sh is not /bin/bash
POSIX shells are horrible unmaintainable bug factories.
shellcheck is not enough to make them safe programming languages. They are acceptable only in an interactive context.
Having anything encourage people to write POSIXy shell scripts is a design flaw.
Continue your ranting on some OpenBSD (uses /bin/ksh in init scripts) mailing list ?
I don't think those are better or worse. My point isn't about some ancient far too limiting standard, but about how easy it is to wreck everything by not knowing some obscure syntactical rule. My issue is about implicit conversion between strings and arrays, about silently swallowing errors and so on. And the only shell languages that I know aren't idiotic are nushell and Powershell.
That KDE theme that nuked some user’s home directory? Used a bash script. That time the bumblebee graphics card switching utility deleted /var? Bash script. Any time some build system broke because of a space in a path: bash/ZSH/... script.
Why would anyone make an init system based on shell scripts these days?
Yes, please. I've got plenty of popcorn for everybody.