Why Bash Sucks

Why Bash Sucks

Bash sucks donkey ass. Bash is 40 years old baggage. ( bash is born in 1989, a enhanced Bourne Shell, Bourne Shell was born in 1979.)

• Syntax soup. E.g. For printing version, you have these variations: -v • -V • -version • --version. Sometimes options can be combined, sometimes not. Some option takes a argument, with many different syntax, some arg separated by space, some require equal sign. Order of options may or may not matter. Many options effect other options in complex way. [see Unix Pipe as Functional Language]
• Semantic noodle. E.g. Some command has recursive option -r, others requires calling find • xargs.
• Randomish and cryptic command names. Part of which are juvenile humor. ls • cat • xargs • pwd • sed • awk • grep • du • file • type • uname • df • diff • ps • top • head • tail • id • with • who • wc • fsck.
• Cryptic and counter-intuitive error code. Success signal is 0. Error is a octal number. Often, you are forced to check the exit code.
• Some command are part of the shell as function, some are independent tools. E.g. ls • kill • ps. Try to find if they are part of bash. And if so, is bash calling it or the independent command. [see Linux by Command Line]
• Lousy doc aka Man Page. Techno babble, cryptic, incomprehensible. No examples of common usage. [see Which Programing Language Has Best Documentation?]
• 40 years of baggage. E.g. tar xvf (no dash), ps -ef vs ps auwx
• 40 years of baggage of init. .bashrc .profile .bash_profile .login [see Bash Init, .bashrc .profile .bash_profile]
• Sea of islands. Each command or tool is written on its own. No coherence. grep • sed • awk • bash • perl. [see Perl Tutorial by Example]

Shell WTFs

someone detailed the problems of unix shell.