I’ve been looking around for a scripting language that:

  • has a cli interpreter
  • is a “general purpose” language (yes, awk is touring complete but no way I’m using that except for manipulating text)
  • allows to write in a functional style (ie. it has functions like map, fold, etc and allows to pass functions around as arguments)
  • has a small disk footprint
  • has decent documentation (doesn’t need to be great: I can figure out most things, but I don’t want to have to look at the interpter source code to do so)
  • has a simple/straightforward setup (ideally, it should be a single executable that I can just copy to a remote system, use to run a script and then delete)

Do you know of something that would fit the bill?


Here’s a use case (the one I run into today, but this is a recurring thing for me).

For my homelab I need (well, want) to generate a luhn mod n check digit (it’s for my provisioning scripts to generate synchting device ids from their certificates).

I couldn’t find ready-made utilities for this and I might actually need might a variation of the “official” algorithm (IIUC syncthing had a bug in their initial implementation and decided to run with it).

I don’t have python (or even bash) available in all my systems, and so my goto language for script is usually sh (yes, posix sh), which in all honestly is quite frustrating for manipulating data.

You are viewing a single thread.
View all comments
8 points

I still love bash. I’m able to accomplish quite a lot with it. I vote bash.

permalink
report
reply
4 points

Also vote bash, but I don’t love it…more of a tolerate.

permalink
report
parent
reply
3 points

Bash? On windows it’s pretty much unusable even if you use cygwin. Python or Lua are the only reasonable suggestions here

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

I just assumed the scripts would run on Linux.

permalink
report
parent
reply
1 point

Nah, gross. You need to set a bunch of global options to get sane behavior on errors.

Nushell is shaping up really really nicely, and it’ll actually stop executing if something fails! Even if that happens in a pipe! And it’s not super eager to convert between arrays and strings if you use the wrong cryptic rune.

permalink
report
parent
reply

Linux

!linux@lemmy.ml

Create post

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word “Linux” in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

Rules

  • Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
  • No misinformation
  • No NSFW content
  • No hate speech, bigotry, etc

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

Community stats

  • 7.7K

    Monthly active users

  • 6.5K

    Posts

  • 179K

    Comments