[Fwd: Re: Send to a Listing]

[felixs]

On Thu, Apr 18, 2019 at 09:16:55AM +1000, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> On 17Apr2019 22:45, felixs <besteck455 at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks for your detailed comments and explanations. It will need a
> > second lecture with the Bash Reference Manual opened in another terminal
> > to fully understand the differences.
> 
> Or, as previously mentioned: just "man sh", not "man bash".
> 
> _Everything_ we've discussed here is plain Bourne shell. The difficulty with
> using the bash manual _as a reference_ is that its little extensions are not
> distinuished from the common subset which works everywhere.  You've remarked
> before that you "like bash", but actually nothing you've described uses
> anything not in the standard shell - you're not "liking bash", you're
> "liking the shell" and thinking the cool stuff is specific to bash - it
> almost always isn't.
> 
> Writing portable scripts is a win because you don't need to change them when
> you step to another distro. Accidentally becoming dependent on some little
> quirk of bash will cause you pain later.
> 
> Most of bash's advantages are to do with interactive use (personally I
> prefer zsh for interactive use): command line editing, job control, etc.
> 
> The scripting language extensions are, in my experience, usually of
> peripheral and rare value - by the time they're genuinely useful it is often
> time to shift to a more capable language like Python anyway because you're
> moving out of the domain to which the shell is well suited.
> 
Ok, I will take your comments into account, and have decided anyway to
shift my attention back to Python which is indeed more capable in terms
of (wider) scope of application and portability. However, I will still 
try to get a final version of this script done.

Cheers,

felixs