this post was submitted on 15 Jan 2025

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Am I crazy in thinking that bash is good enough for production? (lemm.ee)

submitted 2 weeks ago by Badland9085@lemm.ee to c/programming@programming.dev

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This may make some people pull their hair out, but I’d love to hear some arguments. I’ve had the impression that people really don’t like bash, not from here, but just from people I’ve worked with.

There was a task at work where we wanted something that’ll run on a regular basis, and doesn’t do anything complex aside from reading from the database and sending the output to some web API. Pretty common these days.

I can’t think of a simpler scripting language to use than bash. Here are my reasons:

Reading from the environment is easy, and so is falling back to some value; just do ${VAR:-fallback}; no need to write another if-statement to check for nullity. Wanna check if a variable’s set to something expected? if [[ <test goes here> ]]; then <handle>; fi
Reading from arguments is also straightforward; instead of a import os; os.args[1] in Python, you just do $1.
Sending a file via HTTP as part of an application/x-www-form-urlencoded request is super easy with curl. In most programming languages, you’d have to manually open the file, read them into bytes, before putting it into your request for the http library that you need to import. curl already does all that.
Need to read from a curl response and it’s JSON? Reach for jq.
Instead of having to set up a connection object/instance to your database, give sqlite, psql, duckdb or whichever cli db client a connection string with your query and be on your way.
Shipping is… fairly easy? Especially if docker is common in your infrastructure. Pull Ubuntu or debian or alpine, install your dependencies through the package manager, and you’re good to go. If you stay within Linux and don’t have to deal with differences in bash and core utilities between different OSes (looking at you macOS), and assuming you tried to not to do anything too crazy and bring in necessary dependencies in the form of calling them, it should be fairly portable.

Sure, there can be security vulnerability concerns, but you’d still have to deal with the same problems with your Pythons your Rubies etc.

For most bash gotchas, shellcheck does a great job at warning you about them, and telling how to address those gotchas.

There are probably a bunch of other considerations but I can’t think of them off the top of my head, but I’ve addressed a bunch before.

So what’s the dealeo? What am I missing that may not actually be addressable?

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[–] onlinepersona@programming.dev 3 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

May I introduce you to rust script? Basically a wrapper to run rust scripts right from the command line. They can access the rust stdlib, crates, and so on, plus do error handling and much more.

Anti Commercial-AI license

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

Yeah, sometimes I'll use that just to have the sane control flow of Rust, while still performing most tasks via commands.

You can throw down a function like this to reduce the boilerplate for calling commands:

fn run(command: &str) {
    let status = Command::new("sh")
        .arg("-c")
        .arg(command)
        .status()
        .unwrap();
    assert!(status.success());
}

Then you can just write run("echo 'hello world' > test.txt"); to run your command.

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[–] Badland9085@lemm.ee 1 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

How easily can you start parsing arguments and read env vars? Do people import clap and such to provide support for those sorts of needs?

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[–] Anticorp@lemmy.world 3 points 2 weeks ago

I've only ever used bash.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (6 children)

Run checkbashisms over your $PATH (grep for #!/bin/sh). That's the problem with Bash.
#!/bin/sh is for POSIX compliant shell scripts only, use #!/bin/bash if you use bash syntax.

Btw, i quite like yash.

[–] Badland9085@lemm.ee 2 points 2 weeks ago

Always welcome a new shell. I’ve not heard of yash but I’ll check it out.

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[–] thirteene@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Pretty much all languages are middleware, and most of the original code was shell/bash. All new employees in platform/devops want to immediately push their preferred language, they want java and rust environments. It's a pretty safe bet if they insist on using a specific language; then they don't know how awk or sed. Bash has all the tools you need, but good developers understand you write libraries for functionality that's missing. Modern languages like Python have been widely adopted and has a friendlier onboarding and will save you time though.

Saw this guy's post in another thread, he's strawmanning because of lack of knowledge.

[–] BatmanAoD@programming.dev 2 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

Pretty much all languages are middleware, and most of the original code was shell/bash.

What? I genuinely do not know what you mean by this.

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[–] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I'm fine with bash for ci/cd activities, for what you're talking about I'd maybe use bash to control/schedule running of a script in something like python to query and push to an api but I do totally get using the tools you have available.

I use bash a lot for automation but PowerShell is really nice for tasks like this and has been available in linux for a while. Seen it deployed into production for more or less this task, grabbing data from a sql server table and passing to SharePoint. It's more powerful than a shell language probably needs to be, but it's legitimately one of the nicer products MS has done.

End of the day, use the right tool for the job at hand and be aware of risks. You can totally make web requests from sql server using ole automation procedures, set up a trigger to fire on update and send data to an api from a stored proc, if I recall there's a reason they're disabled by default (it's been a very long time) but you can do it.

[–] Badland9085@lemm.ee 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

People have really been singing praises of Powershell huh. I should give that a try some time.

But yeah, we wield tools that each come with their own risks and caveats, and none of them are perfect for everything, but some are easier (including writing it and addressing fallovers for it) to use in certain situations than others.

It’s just hard to tell if people’s fear/disdain/disgust/insert-negative-reaction towards bash is rational or more… tribal, and why I decided to ask. It’s hard to shake away the feeling of “this shouldn’t just be me, right?”

[–] morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

I have to wonder if some of it is comfort or familiarity, I had a negative reaction to python the first time I ever tried it for example, hated the indent syntax for whatever reason.

[–] lurklurk@lemmy.world 2 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

The indent syntax is one of the obviously bad decisions in the design of python so it makes sense

[–] Badland9085@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago

Creature comfort is a thing. You’re used to it. Familiarity. You know how something behaves when you interact with it. You feel… safe. Fuck that thing that I haven’t ever seen and don’t yet understand. I don’t wanna be there.

People who don’t just soak in that are said to be, maybe, adventurous?

It can also be a “Well, we’ve seen what can work. It ain’t perfect, but it’s pretty good. Now, is there something better we can do?”

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