Comment by kadoban
2 years ago
> 2. For standalone scripts... well, I think it's best to reach for a proper programming language (e.g. Python) instead of any shell language, but if I had to use one, I would pick bash. Sure, it has many footguns, but I know them pretty well. And fish language is also not ideal - e.g. IIRC it doesn't have an equivalent of `set -e`, you have to add `; or return 1` to each line.
I'm sure you know this, but: no particular reason the interactive shell you use has to match the shell you use for scripts. All of my scripts are in bash, but I haven't used bash interactively in decades now, at least on purpose.
I write all my scripts with the hash bang as "#! /bin/bash" so even though fish is my interactive shell, I still use bash for all shell scripts. I think the restrictions you mention only apply if you use "#! /bin/sh" rather than bash specifically.
Just fyi, you should use `#!/usr/bin/env bash` instead of `#!/bin/bash` or whatever because you can't assume the location of bash (but the location of `env` is indeed portably fixed). e.g. FreeBSD (and macOS?) has bash at `/usr/local/bin/bash`
And NixOS has bash somewhere in the Nix store... :)
Clarification: /usr/bin/env should be used for pretty much every shebang since it looks up the binary on $PATH.
That assumes you care about portability. Not everybody does.
Writing portable software is difficult, and doing it for shell scripts even more so. Blindly pursuing portability for its own sake is not worth it. Weigh the cost of portability against the odds that the software will ever run on different systems.
For me personally it is never worth it to write my personal programs portably. This would require that I test them on different systems that I do not even use. Pointless.
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bash is /bin/bash on macOS, unless the user really likes bash, in which case it's probably /opt/homebrew/bin/bash or /opt/local/bin/bash
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I'm confirming. Often, when you run a script on more than just your own computer, bash is located in unexpected places.
For me, for example: `/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/bin/bash`
In such cases, scripts containing the absolute path to bash in shebang do not run correctly.