Am I crazy in thinking that bash is good enough for production?

This is almost a strawman argument.

You don’t have to shell out to a db cli. Most of them will gladly take some SQL and spit out some output. Now that output might be in some tabular format with some pretty borders around them that you have to deal with, if you are about the output within your script, but that’s your choice and so deal with it if it’s within your comfort zone to do so. Now if you don’t care about the output and just want it in some file, that’s pretty straightforward, and it’s not too different from just some cli that spits something out and you’ve redirected that output to a file.

I’ve mentioned in another comment where if you need to accept input and use that for your queries, psql is absolutely not the tool to use. If you can’t do it properly in bash and tools, just don’t. That’s fine.

With web API calls, same story really; you may not be all that concerned about the response. Calling a webhook? They’re designed to be a fire and forget, where we’re fine with losing failed connections. Some APIs don’t really follow strict rules with REST, and will gladly include an “ok” as a value in their response to tell you if a request was successful. If knowing that is important to the needs of the program, then, well, there you have it. Otherwise, there are still ways you can get the HTTP code and handle appropriately. If you need to do anything complex with the contents of the response, then you should probably look elsewhere.

My entire post is not to say that “you can do everything in bash and you should”. My point is that there are many cases where bash seems like a good sufficient tool to get that simple job done, and it can do it more easily with less boilerplate than, say, Python or Ruby.

I think I mentioned it, but inverse: The only data type I'm comfortable with in bash are simple string scalars; plus some simple integer handling I suppose. Once I have to think about stuff like "${foo[@]}" and the like I feel like I should've switched languages already.

Plus I rarely actually want arrays, it's way more likely I want something in the shape of

 python

    
@dataclass(frozen=True)
class Foo:
    # …

foos: set[Foo] = …

  

If you need anything that complex and that it’s critical for, say, customers, or people doing things directly for customers, you probably shouldn’t use bash. Anything that needs to grow? Definitely not bash. I’m not saying bash is what you should use if you want it to grow into, say, a web server, but that it’s good enough for small tasks that you don’t expect to grow in complexity.

But not everything needs to scale, at least, if you don’t buy into the doctrine that everything has to be designed and written to live forever. If robust, scalable solutions is the nature of your work and there’s nothing else that can exist, then yeah, Bash likely have no place in that world. If you need any kind of handling more complicated than just getting an error and doing something else, then Bash is not it.

Just because Bash isn’t designed for something you want to do, doesn’t mean it sucks. It’s just not the right tool. Just because you don’t practice law, doesn’t mean you suck; you just don’t do law. You can say that you suck at law though.

Agreed.

Also gtfobins is a great resource in addition to shellcheck to try to make secure scripts.

For instance I felt upon a script like this recently:

    
#!/bin/bash
# ... some stuff ...
tar -caf archive.tar.bz2 "$@"


  

Quotes are OK, shellcheck is happy, but, according to gtfobins, you can abuse tar, so running the script like this: ./test.sh /dev/null --checkpoint=1 --checkpoint-action=exec=/bin/sh ends up spawning an interactive shell...

So you can add up binaries insanity on top of bash's mess.

I don't disagree with your point, but how does set -e break conditionals? I use it all the time without issues

Pipefail I don't use as much so perhaps that's the issue?

I honestly don’t care about being right or wrong. Our trade focuses on what works and what doesn’t and what can make things work reliably as we maintain them, if we even need to maintain them. I’m not proposing for bash to replace our web servers. And I certainly am not proposing that we can abandon robustness. What I am suggesting that we think about here, is that when you do not really need that robustness, for something that may perhaps live in your production system outside of user paths, perhaps something that you, your team, and the stakeholders of the particular project understand that the solution is temporary in nature, why would Bash not be sufficient?

I suspect you just haven’t used Bash enough to hit some of the many many footguns.

Wrong assumption. I’ve been writing Bash for 5-6 years now.

Maybe it’s the way I’ve been structuring my code, or the problems I’ve been solving with it, in the last few years after using shellcheck and bash-language-server that I’ve not ran into issues where I get fucked over by quotes.

But I can assure you that I know when to dip and just use a “proper programming language” while thinking that Bash wouldn’t cut it. You seem to have an image of me just being a “bash glorifier”, and I’m not sure if it’ll convince you (and I would encourage you to read my other replies if you aren’t), but I certainly don’t think bash should be used for everything.

No. If it's missing $1 will silently become an empty string. os.args[1] will throw an error. Much more robust.

You’ll probably hate this, but you can use set -u to catch unassigned variables. You should also use fallbacks wherever sensible.

Absolutely not. Python is strongly typed, and even statically typed if you want. Light years ahead of Bash's mess. Quoting is pretty easy to get right in Python.

Not a good argument imo. It eliminates a good class of problems sure. But you can’t eliminate their dependence on shared libraries that many commands also use, and that’s what my point was about.

And I’m sure you can find a whole dictionary’s worth of cases where people shoot themselves in the foot with bash. I don’t deny that’s the case. Bash is not a good language where the programmer is guarded from shooting themselves in the foot as much as possible. The guardrails are loose, and it’s the script writer’s job to guard themselves against it. Is that good for an enterprise scenario, where you may either blow something up, drop a database table, lead to the lost of lives or jobs, etc? Absolutely not. Just want to copy some files around and maybe send it to an internal chat for regular reporting? I don’t see why not.

Bash is not your hammer to hit every possible nail out there. That’s not what I’m proposing at all.

Certainly so. The same applies to any languages we choose, no?

-e is great until there's a command that you want to allow to fail in some scenario.

I know OP is talking about bash specifically but pipefail isn't portable and I'm not always on a system with bash installed.

That is definitely not something I would do… for work (totally not implying that I miiiight do it outside of work for shits and giggles :P).

I didn’t create this post trying to be like “y’all should just use Bash”, nor is it an attempt to say that I like Bash, but I guess that’s how people boil others down to these days. Fanatics only. Normalcy is dead. (I’m exaggerating ofc)

Any reason to use #!/bin/sh over #!/usr/bin/env sh?

To be fair, you don’t always have to use the [[ syntax. I know I don’t, e.g. if I’m just looking for a command that returns 1 or 0, which happens quite a bit if you get to use grep.

That said, man test is my friend.

But I’ve also gotten so used to using it that I remember -z and -n by heart :P

Why internet man hate Bash? Bash do many thing. Make computer work.

Could you explain those db connection hiccups you’ve seen?

Bash is widely used in production environments for scripting all over enterprises.

But it shouldn't be.

The people you work with just don’t have much experience at lots of shops I would think.

More likely they do have experience of it and have learnt that it's a bad idea.

I’ve never had that impression, and I know that even large enterprises have Bash scripts essentially supporting a lot of the work of a lot of their employees. But there are also many very loud voices that seems to like screaming that you shouldn’t use Bash almost at all.

You can take a look at the other comments to see how some are entirely turned off by even the idea of using bash, and there aren’t just a few of them.

You seem to be familiar with Bash syntax. But others may not be.

If by this you mean that the Bash syntax for doing certain things is horrible and that it could be expressed more clearly in something else, then yes, I agree, otherwise I'm not sure this is a problem on the same level as others.

OP could pick any language and have the same problem. Except maybe Python, but even that strays into symbolic line noise once a project gets big enough.

Either way, comments can be helpful when strange constructs are used. There are comments in my own Bash scripts that say what a line is doing rather than just why precisely because of this.

But I think the main issue with Bash (and maybe other shells), is that it's parsed and run line by line. There's nothing like a full script syntax check before the script is run, which most other languages provide as a bare minimum.

As one other comment mentioned, unfamiliarity with a particular language isn’t restricted to just bash. I could say the same for someone who only dabbles in C being made to read through Python. What’s this @decorator thing? Or what’s f"Some string: {variable}" supposed to do, and how’s memory being allocated here? It’s a domain, and we aren’t expected to know every single domain out there.

And your mention of losing typing and structure information is… ehh… somewhat of a weird argument. There are many cases where you don’t care about the contents of an output and only care about the process of spitting out that output being a success or failure, and that’s bread and butter in shell scripts. Need to move some files, either locally or over a network, bash is good for most cases. If you do need something just a teeny bit more, like whether some key string or pattern exists in the output, there’s grep. Need to do basic string replacements? sed or awk. Of course, all that depends on how familiar you or your teammates are with each of those tools. If nearly half the team are not, stop using bash right there and write it in something else the team’s familiar with, no questions there.

This is somewhat of an aside, but jq is actually pretty well-known and rather heavily relied upon at this point. Not to the point of say sqlite, but definitely more than, say, grep alternatives like ripgrep. I’ve seen it used quite often in deployment scripts, especially when interfaced with some system that replies with a json output, which seems like an increasingly common data format that’s available in shell scripting.

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?”

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.

Those two libraries actually look pretty good, and seems like you can remove a lot of the boilerplate-y code you’d need to write without them. I will keep those in mind.

That said, I don’t necessarily agree that bash is bad from a maintainability standpoint. In a team where it’s not commonly used, yeah, nobody will like it, but that’s just the same as nobody would like it if I wrote in some language the team doesn’t already use? For really simple, well-defined tasks that you make really clear to stakeholders that complexity is just a burden for everyone, the code should be fairly simple and straightforward. If it ever needs to get complicated, then you should, for sure, ditch bash and go for a larger language.

Serious question (as a bash complainer):

Have I missed an amazing bash library for secure database access that justifies a "perfectly good" here?

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:

 rust

    
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.

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?