why?
Because bash feels clunky to write and work with for anything non-trivial, especially compared to other scripting languages.
Why not another scripting language (no compile necessary)?
Because bash and sh are installed nearly everywhere. Any other scripting language means the user is required to have that installed, and that is far less likely to be the case.
If I could write my scripts in a nice syntax, but be sure my users will be able to use it effortlessly by distributing to them compiled versions, then that would make both of our lives easier!
Thoughts? Are there any languges that do this?
Unfortunately shell script is not as portable as you might be anticipating. Different distro run different shells, with different settings, and also different tools. Think BSD grep vs GNU grep.
I’ve seen multi distro scripts that are also able to bootstrap their own assets for each distro/architecture. Don’t see why you wouldn’t be able to check that considering /etc/os-release exists in pretty much every unix like environment.
And having it run on a specific shell type could also be an option.
I discovered a fun one the other day: there is literally no way to represent word-boundary anchors that’s valid in both GNU sed and BSD sed. https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/393968/38050
I haven’t used it, but this node package looks enticing
Doesn’t powershell do this? I’ve been learning powershell, and they keep making a tech agnostic claim along these lines, but I haven’t tested it on Linux yet.
I used it on a Mac and on Windows, for me it feels very modern when compared to bash (although I never was a bash expert).
However, the problem is that it’s not installed by default on Linux (at least on most distros as far as I know) and Mac, and Windows machines might have an outdated version which you’ll have to take into account.
So unfortunately it doesn’t meet OP’s criteria that it should “just work” without installing an interpreter.
python is usually the next step up in admin land
python is a pretty standard install on linux systems since so many things like you’re talking about use it
Not only that it’s basically everywhere, but even if it’s not, you can compile it using something like nuitka and still use it.
Huh, why doesn’t python just ship this? Managing python installs is annoying as hell.
This is about python packaging, like making/getting libraries/apps rather than compiling binaries, but it’s pretty relevant here:
https://chriswarrick.com/blog/2023/01/15/how-to-improve-python-packaging/
I would guess mostly because python interpretes are just about everywhere.
Also the binaries compiled with nuitka end up being much bigger in size. A simple script of a few kb can and up in the hundreds of mb when you start compiling the dependencies, so it’s not a perfect solution.
https://github.com/tdenniston/bish is one such language.
I’d also recommend Shellcheck which helps prevent many problems with shell scripts.
