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Link: Ruby: a great language for shell scripts!: "It’s more than rails!"

I agree. But you know what I really want? A bash code generator. I want to have a tool that lets me create vanilla bash scripts from a higher level language. I’ve come to the conclusion that vanilla bash is in the end the cross platform lingua franca for all kinds of sysadmin type chores and that there’s an art to writing complicated shell scripts. They work great with prompting, defaults, error handling and recovery. But they are a real pain to write, and that they turn out long and complicated and obscure. To paraphrase Philippe Kahn (there’s a really old callout) bash is a write-only language!

phillipe_kahn