It is different in spoken form, written form (chat) and written as a post (like here).

In person, you get a reaction almost immediately. Written as a short chat, you also get a reaction. But like this is more of an accessibility thing rather than the joke not being funny. You know, like those text descriptions of an image (usually for memes).

I really recommend that if you haven’t, that you look at the Bash’s man page.

It’s just amazing.

Yeah, while -e has a lot of limitations, it shouldn’t be thrown out with the bathwater. The unofficial strict mode can still de-weird bash to an extent, and I’d rather drop bash altogether when they’re insufficient, rather than try increasingly hard to work around bash’s weirdness. (I.e. I’d throw out the bathwater, baby and the family that spawned it at that point.)

The issue with set -e is that it’s hideously broken and inconsistent. Let me copy the examples from the wiki I linked.

Or, “so you think set -e is OK, huh?”

Exercise 1: why doesn’t this example print anything?

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
i=0
let i++
echo "i is $i"

Exercise 2: why does this one sometimes appear to work? In which versions of bash does it work, and in which versions does it fail?

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
i=0
((i++))
echo "i is $i"

Exercise 3: why aren’t these two scripts identical?

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
test -d nosuchdir && echo no dir
echo survived 

#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -e
f() { test -d nosuchdir && echo no dir; }
f
echo survived

Exercise 4: why aren’t these two scripts identical?

set -e
f() { test -d nosuchdir && echo no dir; }
f
echo survived

set -e
f() { if test -d nosuchdir; then echo no dir; fi; }
f
echo survived

Exercise 5: under what conditions will this fail?

set -e
read -r foo < configfile

And now, back to your regularly scheduled comment reply.

set -e would absolutely be more elegant if it worked in a way that was easy to understand. I would be shouting its praises from my rooftop if it could make Bash into less of a pile of flaming plop. Unfortunately , set -e is, by necessity, a labyrinthian mess of fucked up hacks.

Let me leave you with a allegory about set -e copied directly from that same wiki page. It’s too long for me to post it in this comment, so I’ll respond to myself.

I was tempted for years to use it as an occasional try/catch, but learning Go made me realize that exceptions are amazing and I miss them, but that it is possible (but occasionally hideously tedious) to write software without them. Like, I feel like anyone who has written Go competently (i.e. they handle every returned err on an individual or aggregated basis) should be able to write relatively error-handled shell. There are still the billion other footguns built directly into bash that will destroy hopes and dreams, but handling errors isn’t too bad if you just have a little die function and the determination to use it.

Aka busybox in disguise 🥸

No clear line, but to me a script is tying together other programs that you run, those programs themselves are the programs. I guess it’s a matter of how complex the logic is too.

That’s sounds terrible honestly

Lua

$time = (get-date).adddays(-30)
gci -file -filter *.pdf `
  | ? { $_.lastwritetime -gt $time } `
  | % { convert -density 300 $_.fullname $($_.fullname + ".jpg") }

🤷

The .net-ification of *nix just seems bonkers to me.

It IS bonkers. As a case study, compare the process of setting up a self-hosted runner in gitlab vs github.

Gitlab does everything The Linux Way. You spin up a slim docker container based on Alpine, pass it the API key, and you’re done. Nice and simple.

Github, being owned by Microsoft, does everything The Microsoft way. The documentation mentions nothing of containers, you’re just meant to run the runner natively, essentially giving Microsoft and anyone else in the repo a reverse shell into your machine. Lovely. Microsoft then somehow managed to make their runner software (reminder: whose entire job consists of pulling a git repo, parsing a yaml file, and running some shell commands) depend on fucking dotnet and a bunch of other bullshit. You’re meant to install it using a shitty setup.sh script that does that stupid thing with detecting what distro you’re on and calling the native package manager to install dependencies. Which of course doesn’t work for shit for anyone who’s not on debain or fedora because those are the only distro’s they’ve bothered with. So you’re either stuck setting up dotnet on your system, or trying to manually banish this unholy abomination into a docker container, which is gonna end up twice the size of gitlab’s pre-made Alpine container thanks to needing glibc to run dotnet (and also full gnu coreutils for some fucking reason)

Bloat is just microsoft’s way of doing things. They see unused resources, and they want to use them. Keep microsoft out of linux.

What type of .net-ification occurs on *nix? I am current linux “admin” and there is close to 0 times where I’ve seen powershell not on windows. Maybe in some microsoft specific hell-scape it is more common, but it’s hard to imagine that there are people that can accept a “shell” that takes 5-10 seconds to start. There are apps written in c# but they aren’t all that common?