I’ve been struggling with a rather complex shell script, and it’s becoming apparent that Bash might not be the best choice for this particular task. While I usually gravitate towards statically typed languages like Go or Rust, I’ve noticed that many people recommend alternative languages such as Lua or Python for scripting tasks.
I’m curious to know your opinions and experiences with scripting languages for larger or more intricate shell scripts. Have you ever encountered a situation where Bash just didn’t cut it, and if so, which scripting languages did you turn to for a more effective solution? Are there any specific languages you found particularly suitable for debugging, testing, or handling complex logic in your shell scripts?
I make bash scripts to automate the configuration of new servers. Stuff like install packages, create users, create groups, configure the database, manage permissions…
I feel like that sort of stuff would be a nightmare to do in high level languages but maybe I’m just too used to bash.
As I already responded to others, my comment was meant in the context of the question, so I would not learn a scripting language in addition to Bash + a programming language.
For just running commands one-after-another, Bash is basically a minimal encoding, so no reason not to use it.
When you do start to need if-elses, loops etc., that’s where Bash starts to become somewhat difficult to read. And personally, as someone who’s not fluent in Bash control flow, I found it quite useful to do the control flow in my programming language of choice, but still just calling commands like you’d do in Bash.
Of course, this is a non-standard setup, and most target hosts will have Bash pre-installed, not rust-script, so it does obviously make a lot of sense to continue using Bash for what you’re doing.
In general, my comment was meant for programmers. An ops person might know a full-fledged programming language, but still want to learn Python, because they need to write tons of Ansible tasks or whatever.