Mastodawn

R.L. Dane

🍵

May 20

Today, I discovered #bash and #ksh extglobs. Very powerful, almost as good as regex!

From BASH(1):

If the extglob shell option is enabled using the shopt builtin, the
shell recognizes several extended pattern matching operators.  In the
following description, a pattern-list is a list of one or more patterns
separated by a |.  Composite patterns may be formed using one or more
of the following sub-patterns:

    ?(pattern-list)
         Matches zero or one occurrence of the given patterns.
    *(pattern-list)
         Matches zero or more occurrences of the given patterns.
    +(pattern-list)
         Matches one or more occurrences of the given patterns.
    @(pattern-list)
         Matches one of the given patterns.
    !(pattern-list)
         Matches anything except one of the given patterns.

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Pete Orrall

@rl_dane Wow, that's really cool. Nearly two decades ago when I was first exposed to Linux and FreeBSD, it was the shell that blew me away. Realizing the full capabilities of a program that was both a tool to navigate the OS as well as a full blown scripting language. Genius.

Not that I was enamored by Windows by any stretch of the imagination but it was unquestionably a serious contributing factor for pursuing the OS as both a career and sheer joy of learning. I lost interest in Windows after that.

Honestly, the Unix-like and Unix-derivative OSes have the best scripting language.

Batch files? Surely you jest.
Powershell? Meh.
JCL? Are you mad???
AppleScript? put the result of flim into flam was elegant in 1987, but pretty eyesore-y today

Gimme 'dat shell!! ;)

Plan 9's rc shell looks to be very powerful. I've just barely begun exploring it, and there are native ports to Unix-style OSes.

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Pete Orrall May 20

@rl_dane The big issue I have with #Powershell is it's long-winded. Man, there is just so much typing for basic tasks. As cryptic as bash is at least it's succinct.

While I want to acknowledge #Microsoft's efforts to bring shell scripting to the #Windows ecosystem, they definitely missed the point on #usability, #UX, and #cognitive #ergonomics. It really seems like Microsoft abandoned #empathy while developing it.

Felt very SQLish to me at a glance. ;)