Safe ways to do things in bash

I've written a ridiculous amount of shell script in my day, especially when doing "devops" before we had a term like "devops" to describe it. I've fallen in almost every pit bash has. With that background, here is my opinion. 1. This article contains excellent advice and should be starred for later retrieval. 2. Having basic scripting skills will make you a way better programmer. Many times I've done huge refactors and needle-in-hay-stack searches using only shell commands. 3. Shell…

I've recently taken to not bothering with shell scripts at all. I just use Python instead. The type system, while it's by no means state of the art, is still miles ahead of the stringly-typed bash. The libraries are excellent; much can be done with the standard library alone. The scripts are much faster (even though the language isn't particularly tuned for performance), since I don't need to spawn a subprocess for each little string manipulation task. And if I…

In Python, `shlex` has utilities for quoting and tokenizing strings for POSIX shells. > Documentation: https://docs.python.org/3/library/shlex.html (Windows users: CMD is hopeless. Sorry. Try powershell.)