- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- programmerhumor@lemmy.ml
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I feel same with regex…
Clearly you don’t write enough bash scripts.
Enough is enough
I’ve had enough of these motherfucking scripts on this motherfucking PC!
When I bash my head into a wall, does that count?
Only if you scripted it
Or scripts for basically any other variant of the Bourne shell. They are, for the most part, very cross compatible.
That’s the only reason I’ve ever done much of anything in shell script. As a network administrator I’ve worked many network appliances running on some flavor of Unix and the one language I can count on to be always available is bash. It has been well worth knowing for just that reason.
I wrote a script to do backups on a ESXi it uses Busybox’s ASH, one thing I learned after spending hours debugging my scripts was that ASH does not support arrays so you have to do everything with temporary files.
There actually is an array in any POSIX shell. You get one array per file/function. It just feels bad to use it. You can abuse ‘set – 1 2 3 4’ to act as a proper array. You can then use ‘for’ without ‘in’ to iterate over it.
for i; do echo $i; done.
Use shift <number> to pop items off.
If I really have to use something more complex, I’ll reach for mkfifo instead so I can guarantee the data can only be consumed once without manipulating entries.
I don’t normally say this, but the AI tools I’ve used to help me write bash were pretty much spot on.
Yeah, an LLM can quickly parrot some basic boilerplate that’s showed up in its training data a hundred times.
For building a quick template that I can tweak to my needs, it works really well. I just don’t find it to be an intuitive scripting language.
Yes, with respect to the grey bearded uncles and aunties; as someone who never “learned” bash, in 2025 I’m letting a LLM do the bashing for me.
Until the magic incantations you don’t bother to understand don’t actually do what you think they’re doing.
Sounds like a problem for future me. That guy hates me lol
Yeah fuck that guy
In fairness, this also happens to me when I write the bash script myself 😂
Yes, I have never wrote a piece of code that didn’t do what I thought it would before LLMs, no sir.
I wonder if there’s a chance of getting
rm -rf /*or zip bombs. Those are definitely in the training data at least.The classic
rm -rf $ENV/homewhere$ENVcan be empty or contain spaces is definitely going to hit someone one day
Regex
Edit: to everyone who responded, I use regex infrequently enough that the knowledge never really crystalizes. By the time I need it for this one thing again, I haven’t touched it in like a year.
Most of regex is pretty basic and easy to learn, it’s the look ahead and look behind that are the killers imo
(?=)for positive lookahead and(?!)for negative lookahead. Stick a<in the middle for lookbehind.
Don’t let the gatekeepers keep you out. This site helps.
Chatgpt helps even more
I know that LLMs are probably very helpful for people who are just getting started, but you will never understand it if you can’t grasp the fundamentals. Don’t let “AI” make you lazy. If you do use LLMs make sure you understand the output it’s giving you enough to replicate it yourself.
This may not be applicable to you specifically, but I think this is nice info to have here for others.
You always forget regex syntax?
I’ve always found it simple to understand and remember. Even over many years and decades, I’ve never had issues reading or writing simple regex syntax (excluding the flags and shorthands) even after long regex breaks.
It’s not about the syntax itself, it’s about which syntax to use. There are different ones and remembering which one is for which language is tough.
I give you that, true. I wish vim had PCRE
There is the “very magic” mode for vim regexes. It’s not the exact PCRE syntax, but it’s pretty close. You only need to add \v before the expression to use it. There is no permanent mode / option though. (I think you can remap the commands, like / to /\v)
This is exactly it. Regex is super simple. The difficulty is maintaining a mental mapping between language/util <-> regex engine <-> engine syntax & character class names. It gets worse when utils also conditionally enable extended syntaxes with flags or options.
The hardest part is remembering whether you need to use
\wor[:alnum:].Way too few utils actually mention which syntax they use too. Most just say something accepts a “regular expression”, which is totally ambiguous.
This is one of the best uses for LLM’s imo. They do all my regex for me.
No. Learn it properly once and you’re good. Also it’s super handy in vim.
interns gonna intern
You get used to it, I don’t even see the code—I just see: group… pattern… read-ahead…
twitch
Bash substitution is regex-level wizardry.
Slapping a $ before an environment variable name is “wizardry?”
Nope, the whole
{variable/regex/replacement}syntaxAll the string manipulation functions are easy: https://tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/string-manipulation.html
This one is my bookmark
Every time I have to do this I always go here. I can never remember the prefix suffix parts next time I do parameter substitution.
interns be interning
Not quite that, but more the
${variable##.*}sort of thing.Back then, a pain in the ass. Nowadays, I just let an AI handle that. I used this crap for years and years and still cannot remember, which symbols you need in which order. And why should I remember? I’m not the computer. The computer should know, not me.
Right, so that’s just the string manipulation functions. I already posted a link to the bible for this following a different reply to the same comment to which you replied.
This is why I finally switched to nushell.
I love Nushell
I’d been considering it for awhile, but thought it wasn’t worth the trouble of switching until I realized just how often I do things the tedious manual way because writing a bash script to do it is so arcane
VLOOKUP. Every time. Also Catan Cities and Knights.
Today I tried to write bash (I think)
I grabbed a bunch of commands, slapped a bunch of “&&” to string them together and saved them to a .sh file.
It didn’t work as expected and I did not, at all, look at any documentation during the process. (This is obviously on me, I’ll try harder next time)
Remember to make the .sh file executable with chmod +x
I try to remember to use man when learning a new command/program. And I almost always half-ass it and press the search button immediately to find whatever flag i need.
Incredibly true for me these days. But don’t fret, shellcheck and tldp.org is all you need. And maybe that one stackoverflow answer about how to get the running script’s directory
This. But Pandas and Numpy.
Pandas and Numpy and Bash.
Oh my!
.loc and .iloc queries are a fun syntax adventure every time
Unironically love powershell
For a defacto windows admin my Powershell skills are…embarrassing lol but I’m getting there!
I mastered and forgot almost entirely RegEx several times now
eh I had an entire career based on regex and i still used rubular on the daily once someone made it. there’s too many corner cases for a biological entity!
Finite rules for perfectly sifting infinite options
well said!
“mastered”
Mastered as in I could teach it to others, and assemble many complicated rules for many complicated patterns.
I am always impressed with folks that retain it.
I would a ton of it for a month or two, and then do nothing with it again for more than a year or more.
It takes a lot for permanent burn-in for me. That’s the curse. The blessing is that I learn very quickly.
Any no-SQL syntax for interacting with databases.
There’s always the old piece of wisdom from the Unix jungle: “If you write a complex shellscript, sooner or later you’ll wish you wrote it in a real programming language.”
I wrote a huge PowerShell script over the past few years. I was like “Ooh, guess this is a resume item if anyone asks me if I know PowerShell.” …around the beginning of the year I rewrote the bloody thing in Python and I have zero regrets. It’s no longer a Big Mush of Stuff That Does a Thing. It’s got object orientation now. Design patterns. Things in independent units. Shit like that.
I consider python a scripting language too.
I use it for scripting too. I don’t need Python as much as before nowaday.
They’re all programming languages, they all have their places.
All scripting languages are programming languages but not all programming languages are scripting languages
I initially read “UNIX jungle” as “UNIX jingle” and thought I had been really missing out!
You have, look up the SuSE songs.
Me with powershell. I’ll write a pretty complex script, not write powershell for 3 months, come back and have to completely relearn it.
