Explanation for newbies:

  • Shell is the programming language that you use when you open a terminal on linux or mac os. Well, actually “shell” is a family of languages with many different implementations (bash, dash, ash, zsh, ksh, fish, …)

  • Writing programs in shell (called “shell scripts”) is a harrowing experience because the language is optimized for interactive use at a terminal, not writing extensive applications

  • The two lines in the meme change the shell’s behavior to be slightly less headache-inducing for the programmer:

    • set -euo pipefail is the short form of the following three commands:
      • set -e: exit on the first command that fails, rather than plowing through ignoring all errors
      • set -u: treat references to undefined variables as errors
      • set -o pipefail: If a command piped into another command fails, treat that as an error
    • export LC_ALL=C tells other programs to not do weird things depending on locale. For example, it forces seq to output numbers with a period as the decimal separator, even on systems where coma is the default decimal separator (russian, dutch, etc.).

  • The title text references “posix”, which is a document that standardizes, among other things, what features a shell must have. Posix does not require a shell to implement pipefail, so if you want your script to run on as many different platforms as possible, then you cannot use that feature.

  • esa
    2·
    7 hours ago

    Yeah, another way to do it is

    #!/bin/bash
set -euo pipefail

if [[ $# -lt 1 ]]
then
  echo "Usage: $0 argument1" >&2
  exit 1
fi

    i.e. just count arguments. Related, fish has kind of the orthogonal situation here, where you can name arguments in a better way, but there’s no set -u

    function foo --argument-names bar
  ...
end

    in the end my conclusion is that argument handling in shells is generally bad. Add in historic workarounds like if [ "x" = "x$1" ] and it’s clear shells have always been Shortcut City

    Side note: One point I have to award to Perl for using eq/lt/gt/etc for string comparisons and ==/</> for numeric comparisons. In shells it’s reversed for some reason? The absolute state of things when I can point to Perl as an example of something that did it better

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      2·
      7 hours ago

      Perl is the original GOAT! It took a look at shell, realised it could do (slightly) better, and forged its own hacky path!

      • dx1@lemmy.world
        2·
        6 hours ago

        I was about to say, half the things people write complex shell scripts for, I’ll just do in something like Perl, Ruby, Python, even node/TS, because they have actual type systems and readability. And library support. Always situation-dependent though.