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submitted 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) by GravitySpoiled@lemmy.ml to c/linux@lemmy.ml

What do you advice for shell usage?

  • Do you use bash? If not, which one do you use? zsh, fish? Why do you do it?
  • Do you write #!/bin/bash or #!/bin/sh? Do you write fish exclusive scripts?
  • Do you have two folders, one for proven commands and one for experimental?
  • Do you publish/ share those commands?
  • Do you sync the folder between your server and your workstation?
  • What should've people told you what to do/ use?
  • good practice?
  • general advice?
  • is it bad practice to create a handful of commands like podup and poddown that replace podman compose up -d and podman compose down or podlog as podman logs -f --tail 20 $1 or podenter for podman exec -it "$1" /bin/sh?

Background

I started bookmarking every somewhat useful website. Whenever I search for something for a second time, it'll popup as the first search result. I often search for the same linux commands as well. When I moved to atomic Fedora, I had to search for rpm-ostree (POV: it was a horrible command for me, as a new user, to remember) or sudo ostree admin pin 0. Usually, I bookmark the website and can get back to it. One day, I started putting everything into a .bashrc file. Sooner rather than later I discovered that I could simply add ~/bin to my $PATH variable and put many useful scripts or commands into it.

For the most part I simply used bash. I knew that you could somehow extend it but I never did. Recently, I switched to fish because it has tab completion. It is awesome and I should've had completion years ago. This is a game changer for me.

I hated that bash would write the whole path and I was annoyed by it. I added PS1="$ " to my ~/.bashrc file. When I need to know the path, I simply type pwd. Recently, I found starship which has themes and adds another line just for the path. It colorizes the output and highlights whenever I'm in a toolbox/distrobox. It is awesome.

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[-] nawordar@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago
  • Fish. Much, much saner defaults.
  • I am writing #!/usr/bin/env sh for dead simple scripts, so they will be a tiny bit more portable and run a tiny bit faster. The lack of arrays causes too much pain in longer scripts. I would love to use Fish, but it lacks a strict mode.
  • No, why would I?
  • I used to share all my dotfiles, scripts included, but I was too afraid that I would publish some secrets someday, so I stopped doing that. For synchronizing commands, aliases and other stuff between computers I use Chezmoi.
  • To use Fish instead of fighting with start up time of Zsh with hundreds of plugins
  • Always use the so-called "strict mode" in Bash, that is, the set -euo pipefail line. It will make Bash error on non-zero exit code, undefined variables and non-zero exit codes in commands in pipe. Also, always use shellcheck. It's extremely easy to make a mistake in Bash. If you want to check the single command exit code manually, just wrap it in set +e and set -e.
  • Consider writing your scripts in Python. Like Bash, it also has some warts, but is multiplatform and easy to read. I have a snippet which contains some boilerplate like a main function definition with ArgumentParser instantiated. Then at the end of the script the main function is called wrapped in try … except KeyboardInterrupt: exit(130) which should be a default behavior.
  • Absolutely not a bad practice. If you need to use them on a remote server and can't remember what they stand for, you can always execute type some_command. Oh, and read about abbreviations in Fish. It always expands the abbreviation, so you see what you execute.
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
96 points (94.4% liked)

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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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