this post was submitted on 26 Jun 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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If your bash script gets longer than 200 lines (including argument handling), use Python. I have to support bash APPLICATIONS at work and it's a fucking nightmare to maintain.
I would then assume those scripts weren't written properly to begin with.
But yes, shell scripts should be used (normally) to automate some simple tasks (file copying, backups...) or as an wrapper to exec some other program. I've written several shell scripts to automate things on my personal machines.
However shell script can be complex program while at the same time being (somewhat) easy to maintain:
This way at least I don't break my scripts, when I need to modify a function or some way extend my scripts. Keeping the UNIX philosophy inside shell scripts: let one function do one thing well.
And of course: YMMV. People have wastly different coding standards when it comes to personal little(?) projects.
How do you unit test something like that?
I had several tests at the beginning of the script. These tests define the "low-level" functions based the capability of the shell. To test new features I "simply" ran all the necessary commands on the test environments (bash, busybox, toybox+mksh).
The script would error out if some necessary capability was missing from the host system. It also had a feature to switch shell if it found a better one (preferring busybox and its internal tools).
Yeah... It was tedious process. It was one of those "I'll write a simple script. So simple that it'll work on almost every posixy shell."... rest is history.
I haven't used it on a project for money, but I have some tests in shunit2 and that alone encourages me to extract code to functions.