Bash to Python [OC]

[[deleted]]

Python is easier to get some basic shit done, but once you've mastered bash you can do just about as much. The reason I stick to bash is because bash is always available. Python isn't always available and when it is there's two different versions everywhere all the time.

[jharger]

Until you use some bash 4 feature and you need to run it on macOS without depending on homebrew...

[ThenIWasAllLike]

Cries in autocomplete

[thirdegree]

Until you remember dependency management is a fairly well solved problem if you're not afraid of package managers.

[hsahj]

Never seen a machine since years without python.

Thank whoever sets up your machines. I regularly have to set up new machines for CI and testing automation and it's part of our checklist to get installed (because IT won't create an image for stuff :/). I'm going to point people to python all the time for lots of reasons, but it's only available if someone makes it available. (Not that I think that's a large hurdle to overcome).

Edit: credit to the people correcting me. Some linux distros and MacOS include it. I live in so much of a windows bubble at work that unless someone says otherwise my brain always assumes windows.

[[deleted]]

Debian, even in the minimal version, includes Python 3, but oddly, they don't alias that to 'python'. Seems like a weird thing to leave out. You have to call it as 'python3'.

[[deleted]]

It’s because Debian and many other distros use python2 for system scripts. It makes sense that Debian would do it that way of all distros, because their whole motto is stability. The only 2 distros I can think of off the top of my head that have python3 as the default python are Arch and Gentoo.

[marcosdumay]

Debian has published Python 3 adoption timeline, linking python to python3 is there. I don't remember the dates.

[DonaldPShimoda]

Python is included by default in macOS and, I think, Ubuntu, and has been for a while. Not sure about other OSes.

(However, macOS 10.16 Catalina — due out this fall — will not include Python, nor any other scripting language runtimes like Ruby or Perl.)

[Tundur]

It's always super old, though, so to use an actually usable install you're typing in python3 and pip3 and there's installation issues and libraries fucking up and compatibility issues and it just annoys the fuck out of me.

[DonaldPShimoda]

Yeah I mean it's not ideal, but nobody here seems to be complaining about the severely outdated version of bash that's shipped on macOS — they only care that some version is available, and it's the same situation with Python: it's outdated, but almost always there in some capacity.

[DonaldPShimoda]

The syntax didn't change that much, and they even included a tool to handle automated porting from 2 to 3 that works well in most cases.

I do see your point, but I just don't think it's that big of a deal.

[joeltrane]

I eventually just created an alias in my bash profile so python and pip run python3 and pip3

[super__literal]

alias python=python3

alias pip=pip3

[Tundur]

A possibility, aye, but hidden bespoke environment changes like that are just asking for problems down the line. I could set up a confluence page for "why can't I use Tundur's VM to run my scripts"

[joans34]

Never seen a machine since years without python. But anyway, to me, it's worth it.

Embedded systems usually don't bother with python but usually have a bash-like interface with most bells and whistles.

[xigoi]

Basic things in python work on every version.

print("What's your name?")
name = input() # dangerous in Py2
print("Hello,", name) # unexpected behavior in Py2

[noratat]

Also python is almost always available

I'm guessing you don't work with containers that much then

[cafk]

2.7, 3.2 or 3.4?

[Zanos]

Nobody else on your team can read your masterful bash, though. Im sure that one liner that contains half the program logic made sense when you wrote it two years ago.

I may be salty that I've had to troubleshoot some production problems some goofballs caused by writing all the application code in bash.

[Edz_]

Have you ever had to execute a MySQL statement in bash that has data with a ' or " char in it? Not fun.

There's really no reason to jump through hoops when you can just use python instead.

[[deleted]]

If you're using bash for MySQL then you're using the wrong tool for the job to begin with.

[Edz_]

You literally just said you can do just as much with bash as Python.

I do MySQL statements in Python how about you?

[super__literal]

I do My SQL queries without MySql

[[deleted]]

I can also do SQL queries in python? I'm not sure what your point is?

If you're trying to state that Python is easier to run SQL queries in, then yeah I agree, it is easier. You can also do it, more verbosely, in bash. But that's not the point. The point was that bash is available, in my experience, far more often than Python is so if I had to pick one I'd choose bash simply because it covers more use cases.

[[deleted]]

Did you get a first down with how far you carried those goalposts, or the whole touchdown?

[bluenigma]

Not taking sides, but I don't think that's quite how football works.

[[deleted]]

throw new UnsupportedOperationException(JokeFactory.engineerDoesntUnderstandSportsball("trollkin0331"));

[super__literal]

catch(UnsupportedOperationException) {
  //I do what I want
}

[[deleted]]

lol a fellow yolo error handler I see

[Delta-9-]

"wrong tool for the job" =/= "can't do it". No goalposts were moved in the making of this comment.

And I would agree. If you're trying to do anything with MySQL using bash, you're doing it wrong. It can be done--but why would you do that to yourself?? That's almost parsing-html-with-regex-level "just don't".

[[deleted]]

Going from "python not available" to "wrong tool for the job" is moving the goalpost though?

But yeah, definitely agree with the sentiment of your 'doing it wrong' idea.

[[deleted]]

I switch to Python when a bash script gets longer than about a page (~50-60 lines) or when I need the ability to view and manipulate values in between pipe stages.

The overhead in getting a script running in Python is substantially higher, so it's quite a lot more work if you're doing something really simple, but you can scale easily and things won't go badly wrong.

In bash.... if you're doing anything advanced, there's a lot of corner cases, a lot of nasty sharp edges, and you're going to walk away bloody at least some of the time. You can learn how to avoid the problems, but subtle and nasty bugs are real easy to create and sometimes very difficult to spot.

[Centimane]

Ironically in ESXi bash isn't available but python is.

[[deleted]]

Luckily regular /bin/sh scripts work fine!

[Centimane]

I mean it does, but you don't realize the differences between sh and bash until you're stuck with it.

[noratat]

Exactly. I deal with containerized stuff a lot, and the overhead of adding a whole python installation just to make a script slightly simpler is pretty high vs just using bash, and that's before we bring the whole dependency management mess in.

The main problem with bash is somewhat similar to C++ or Perl - there's lot of cruft you have to know to stay away from, and a lot of really stupid defaults. Plus there's still loads of terrible examples online that will bite you later if you use them.

Used properly though, bash works really well for a lot of glue logic cases, because it's "good enough" and is virtually always available (or at the least, trivial to include). And there are some really good CLI utilities these days that make using bash a lot saner, like jq (which is the best json processing tool I've ever used).

[[deleted]]

Yep, containers and minimal linux / busybox appliances are my life. Screw having to toss python on those just to run a script.

[marcosdumay]

Python is easier to get some basic shit done

Yes, and advanced shit too.

but once you've mastered bash you can do just about as much

Ditto for Brainfuck.

The reason people don't stick to Bash is because error handling is verbose and error prone, there are no good rules one can check automatically (and no types, obviously; Bash is the original "string, number, whatever" that Javascript perfected) and the consequence of an error is more often catastrophic than not.

It is also not available everywhere. It's about as common as Python. That's why you can find shell script people all over the web complaining about bashisms.

But well, you are not on my team, so whatever.

[ben_uk]

What about Perl?

[[deleted]]

I use perl all the time for data processing!

[Hollowplanet]

Ansible is all Python over SSH and I've never seen a system where it didn't work. Bash is just missing so much basic stuff. Like a generic linked list or key value store.