Shell Scripts

Posted May 6, 2010 16:43 UTC (Thu) by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
In reply to: Shell Scripts by paulj
Parent article: Poettering: Rethinking PID 1

> Why do you think the people who write poor shell scripts would do any better in any other language, just out of curiosity?

Mainly because there is no syntactical difference between a string and a command. The reason why is explained here: <http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/279011/a-z_progra...>

As a consequence quoting is a nightmare, as explained here: <http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/~uwe/lehre/unixffb/quoting-guid...>

Also it has a extremely limited number of features. The Python tutorial is a very nice list of the features that shell is missing <http://docs.python.org/tutorial/>

Another big problem is the lack of namespaces but this latter one is not unique to shell.

Past some size any shell project should switch to Python or Perl. I actually have implemented projects that should have switched.