Oil Shell: Success with Aboriginal, Alpine, and Debian Linux
Someone should push a patch to upstream bash that will make any script longer than 50 lines abort. If you&#x27;re building something that takes 2500 lines of shell script, you&#x27;re using the wrong tool for the job. You&#x27;re trying to make a program, but in a syntax (I was going to say language, but shell scripts aren&#x27;t a programming language) that is utterly unsuited for anything like it.<p>A shell script has a very simple function: execute a number of tedious but common commands. That&#x27;s it. Unfortunately someone decided they wanted control flow, so they wrote the horrifying [ and [[ programs, which I still consider to be a crime against humanity. Enter decades of write-once-read-never scripts that run with abysmal efficiency, kill maintainability, and neuter innovation. And somehow the entire Linux ecosystem depends on it and now every distro has to ship a shell with cruft dating back to 1970, with probably as many hidden vulnerabilities. And now every shell that tries to position itself on the market has to implement the same quirks, bugs, and design flaws in order to even be considered.<p>Let shells be shells, let shell scripts be dumb as bricks, and please use python or even perl for the love of god if you&#x27;re going to make a build system.