Post #1935800

2026-05-01 12:10 UTC

When did Bash become like Perl, &quot;not suitable for anything but one-liners&quot;? People writing Python scripts when a simple Bash script will do. What&#39;s worse is that people are using AI to learn to code, and AI is injecting _opinions_ into that. Gemini (the AI I am required to find a use for at work) told me that Bash is only useful for one-liners, and my co-manager also said it wasn&#39;t worth teaching the team Bash. My team _lives_ in Bash all day long...

Replies (3)

@raven@fedi.raventhemaker.com 2026-05-01 12:11

Even if they don't write permanent scripts, understanding Bash better will make them more efficient at the command line. I've seen employees do painfully tedious things by hand because they don't know the basics of shell scripting.

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@crazybutable@mastodon.social 2026-05-01 20:43

@raven@fedi.raventhemaker.com annoying

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@phred4269@c.im 2026-05-02 00:10

@raven@fedi.raventhemaker.com I’d say 1989. The shell is not a programming language but a collection of useful functions. I used to have a list curated from many years of our team maintaining about 50k lines of the stuff which we later replaced with about half that in python. Not having a solid test framework was at the top and bottom of that list. It is very useful for stuff, but like Perl you need to limit it for maintainability.

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