(off topic) I'm sure that was true at some point, but the comment is out of date now. To my surprise, if you download the current bash source code from [1], it actually has a yacc grammar -- see parse.y. It's 6000 lines, but it would be less intelligible without yacc I'm sure.
Honestly, it might be Stockholm syndrome, but I don't find bash hard to parse at all. The only real problem I see is that people get in trouble when they try to nest quoting styles. But there's basically never any reason to do that. User-defined functions basically eliminate this (may not be POSIX compliant, but supported in all shells I know of),
I factor all my shell scripts into 2 to 10 line functions and they are super easy to maintain and are 5-10x shorter than any alternative.
User-defined functions basically eliminate this (may not be POSIX compliant, but supported in all shells I know of),
User-defined functions are part of POSIX, but the function keyword is not. This bit me when I was porting a script from bash to dash (worth the effort on slower devices, as dash is significantly faster loading).
On bash you could do something like this:
function foo()
{
echo "Foo"
}
In POSIX shell (and, thus, also bash) you do this:
Comments
(off topic) I'm sure that was true at some point, but the comment is out of date now. To my surprise, if you download the current bash source code from [1], it actually has a yacc grammar -- see parse.y. It's 6000 lines, but it would be less intelligible without yacc I'm sure.
Honestly, it might be Stockholm syndrome, but I don't find bash hard to parse at all. The only real problem I see is that people get in trouble when they try to nest quoting styles. But there's basically never any reason to do that. User-defined functions basically eliminate this (may not be POSIX compliant, but supported in all shells I know of),
I factor all my shell scripts into 2 to 10 line functions and they are super easy to maintain and are 5-10x shorter than any alternative.
[1] http://tiswww.case.edu/php/chet/bash/bashtop.html
User-defined functions basically eliminate this (may not be POSIX compliant, but supported in all shells I know of),
User-defined functions are part of POSIX, but the function keyword is not. This bit me when I was porting a script from bash to dash (worth the effort on slower devices, as dash is significantly faster loading).
On bash you could do something like this:
In POSIX shell (and, thus, also bash) you do this: Reference: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh#functionbash is not the Bourne shell - it's the Bourne Again shell. sh is the Bourne shell.