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From: Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Useless Use Of Regexes
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2025 00:42:08 -0000 (UTC)
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On Tue, 25 Mar 2025 13:03:45 +0100, Marc Haber wrote:

> This is a classic example why shellscripts are inferior. If you had
> written that in python, you could just ingest iproute's output in a
> python data structire and access it naturally.
>
> A very wise German person, today a friend of mine, used to say 25
> years ago: "Verwende perl. Shell will man können, dann aber nicht
> verwenden." In English that would be "Use Perl. You want to be able
> to use Shell, but then don't use it." Today, of course, that would
> be python.

There is a certain challenge in seeing how far you can push things in
a shell script (or specifically, a bash script), before giving up and
switching to Python. For example, figuring out how to deal with
arbitrary file names, which might include funny characters like spaces
and newlines -- can that be done in bash? Yes it can. But maybe it’s
more trouble than it’s worth ...

My classic example of a large, yet well-written shell script is the
configure script for FFmpeg
<https://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=tree;h=refs/heads/master;hb=refs/heads/master>.
It’s over 8000 lines. Obviously it must be handwritten, not generated
by GNU Autotools in the traditional way, because you can actually read
it and understand what it does.