I am realizing today that Bash has specific value for rapid enterprise scripting. Been tasked with writing a quick namespace script that will do a Helm 2 to 3 upgrade and finding all the learning I did with Bash to be coming in handy. Here’s why:
The biggest deciding issue for this day is that the person sending the task to me actually wrote pseudo-code that is already essentially in shell. These people think in shell about their tasks, with a bit of Python. Once upon a time they would all think in Perl, but those days have (unfortunately) passed. Bash is king, for today. (I wonder what they would do if I wrote it in Node, lol.)
This puts Bash in the ultimate sweet spot for creating such things. I’m
happy to see that my beloved Bash-isms (that I have a hard time
isolating from POSIX, which is what shellcheck
is for).
For what it’s worth, this is exactly what Google does internally (and has for years). Google has created one of the best shell scripting style guides I’ve found.