this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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Programming
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Oof. Looks like this affected some other languages as well - somebody at Microsoft needs to up their documentation game, methinks.
This hurts my brain. We have nice shell languages now, can we just lock down and phase out the rest please? I don't even want to know the hidden cost of running Bash or sh scripts tbh. Both are languages where you can do something not right enough, because everything just has to be obnoxious.
I won't argue with you that bash is janky and easily insecure, but what shell language do you think should replace bash?
Powershell
/s
Python😎
While there certainly is some overlap, Python is a scripting language and not a shell language. Some tasks that involve calling lots of different programs and juggling input and output streams are much easier done in bash than in Python.
Absolutely true, it was more of a joke because Python is being used for pretty much anything today. I really don't want to mess with correct indentation in my terminal.
The only semi-realistic way I can see Bash becoming mostly obsolete is with a tool that provides automated migration of large scripts, and the only project I know of that's even attempting that is Oil: https://www.oilshell.org/
But for spawning a command in a subprocess, there really ought to be a standard OS API that doesn't involve invoking a shell at all. I expect that most or all implementations of
posix_spawnandexecvedon't invoke a shell, but the standard call to start a process on Windows,CreateProcess, apparently does involvecmd.exefor some bizarre reason, and that's why this is a problem in the first place.I think fish is simply fantastic. Not only is it significantly more readable than most other shell languages, it was also recently rewritten in Rust (still in testing I think), which gives me a lot of confidence when it comes to your typical vulnerabilities.
I mean sure, a Rust vulnerability the reason we're talking, but let's not forget how valuable memory and thread safety are.