<story><title>Linux Terminal Goods</title><url>http://diego-pacheco.blogspot.com/2019/09/linux-terminal-goods.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wiz21c</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve just skimmed around it as someone who repeatedly need that kind of book to achieve little things in bash.&lt;p&gt;I understand bash is the basis of so many things, that its importance is just enormous.&lt;p&gt;But at the same time, I&amp;#x27;m appalled by its syntax, idioms, etc. It&amp;#x27;s barely readable for the casual reader that I am. I wonder why nobody tries to provide a meaningful alternative. I&amp;#x27;ve seen some (in python for example) but I&amp;#x27;m kind of surprised nobody puts more money in such an effort.&lt;p&gt;For example, the &amp;quot;trim string&amp;quot; function described at the beginning of the book is horrible (although probably very clever). Why not simply provide a built in function ? That would make code so much cleaner...&lt;p&gt;I ask the question honestly, it&amp;#x27;s not a rant :-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>Generally if you&amp;#x27;re trying to do something that feels like a &amp;quot;program&amp;quot; in shell script, rather than loosely gluing existing tools together, the threshold for moving it into Perl or Python should be low. Even things like trying to get the quoting right for lists of files some of which may have spaces in their names is fiddly enough to drive people to writing a &amp;quot;proper&amp;quot; program.&lt;p&gt;(or was this comment intended for &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=21013150&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=21013150&lt;/a&gt; )</text></comment>
<story><title>Linux Terminal Goods</title><url>http://diego-pacheco.blogspot.com/2019/09/linux-terminal-goods.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wiz21c</author><text>I&amp;#x27;ve just skimmed around it as someone who repeatedly need that kind of book to achieve little things in bash.&lt;p&gt;I understand bash is the basis of so many things, that its importance is just enormous.&lt;p&gt;But at the same time, I&amp;#x27;m appalled by its syntax, idioms, etc. It&amp;#x27;s barely readable for the casual reader that I am. I wonder why nobody tries to provide a meaningful alternative. I&amp;#x27;ve seen some (in python for example) but I&amp;#x27;m kind of surprised nobody puts more money in such an effort.&lt;p&gt;For example, the &amp;quot;trim string&amp;quot; function described at the beginning of the book is horrible (although probably very clever). Why not simply provide a built in function ? That would make code so much cleaner...&lt;p&gt;I ask the question honestly, it&amp;#x27;s not a rant :-)</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>orev</author><text>Shells are made for people to interact with, not for programming. They happen to also be useful for programming, so many things have been added on over time to support that.&lt;p&gt;Shell scripting is also the least painful way to call many external programs and glue them together into something useful. Calling external programs from “real” programming languages is far more painful.&lt;p&gt;If you need a real programming language, as you mentioned, use something designed for that.</text></comment>