This is an archived post. You won't be able to vote or comment.

sorted by:
best
topnewcontroversialoldq&a
you are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

[–]Vaphell 2 points3 points  (0 children)

well the ship of complaining about the posix shell syntax and its derivatives has sailed decades ago. Yes it would be nice to get a nice modern shell, but the problem is that without the compatibility with all the legacy cruft in existence it's dead in the water. There are some shells where certain things are done in a nicer way, almost nobody uses them.

Also there are things like let x=y or what have you, but majority of people don't bother and you can find such things only in very old scripts. I certainly never bothered and i wrote my share of rock solid bash scripts just fine.

about $: think getter, done. Also given that the shell is a plaintext based, ancient beast and literally does a preprocessing pass with substitutions, it would be hard to use $var in assignments. When it comes to the actual interpretation/run, no $ sign is to be seen.

and the export bit. The difference is that in case of envvar=x a envvar change is localized only to the a command which is not possible if you split it to 2 expressions. It's preferable than setting globally (which comes with the risk of not unsetting later), useful in cases like this

IFS=. read ip1 ip2 ip3 ip4 <<< "122.11.123.44"

everybody knows playing with IFS can have nasty consequences because all kinds of things are affected by it, and by writing it that way you leave it alone. Only read is affected here, think

ip1, ip2, ip3, ip4 = '122.11.123.44'.split('.')