Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting things
Hands down, shell scripting is one of my all time favorite languages. It gets tons of hate, e.g. "If you have to write more than 10 lines, then use a <i>real</i> language," but I feel like those assertions are more socially-founded opinions than technically-backed arguments.<p>My basic thesis is that Shell as a programming language---with it's dynamic scope, focus on line-oriented text, and pipelines---is simply a different programming paradigm than languages like Perl, Python, whatever.<p>Obviously, if your mental model is BASIC and you try to write Python, then you encounter lots of friction and it's easy for the latter to feel hacky, bad and ugly. To enjoy and program Python well, it's probably best to shift your mental model. The same goes for Shell.<p>What is the Shell paradigm? I would argue that it's line-oriented pipelines. There is a ton to unpack in that, but a huge example where I see friction is overuse of variables in scripts. Trying to stuff data inside variables, with shell's paucity of data types is a recipe for irritation. However, if you instead organize all your data in a format that's sympathetic to line-oriented processing on stdin-stdout, then shell will work with you instead of against.<p>/2cents