Hacker News with Generative AI: Shell Scripting

YAD: display graphical dialogs from shell scripts or command line (ingk.se)
YAD - (Yet Another Dialog) is a simple tool for developing Graphical User Interfaces.

Command Line, GUI, Shell Scripting, Linux

50 points by modinfo 32 days ago | 15 comments

Bash Style Guide (ysap.sh)
This guide outlines how to write bash scripts with a style that makes them safe and predictable.

Bash, Programming, Shell Scripting, Style Guides

5 points by smartmic 33 days ago | 0 comments

Hell: Shell Scripting Haskell Dialect (chrisdone.github.io)
This is a copy of the script that generates my blog.

Shell Scripting, Haskell, Programming Languages, Blogging, Software

12 points by behnamoh 66 days ago | 0 comments

Advanced Shell Scripting with Bash (2006) [pdf] (uniforumchicago.org)

Bash, Shell Scripting, Programming, Unix, PDF

135 points by transpute 71 days ago | 112 comments

Demystifying the (Shebang): Kernel Adventures (crocidb.com)
From my first experience creating a shell script, I learned about the shebang (#!), the special first line used to specify the interpreter for executing the script:

Shell Scripting, Operating Systems, Linux

189 points by thunderbong 78 days ago | 36 comments

Any program can be a GitHub Actions shell (yossarian.net)
In GitHub Actions, you can use the shell keyword to specify the shell that runs a given run: block. This keyword is optional for workflows but mandatory for action definitions.

GitHub Actions, Shell Scripting, Software Development, Automation

282 points by woodruffw 81 days ago | 101 comments

Techniques Hacker News Uses to Create Great Shell Scripts (nochlin.com)
After publishing my previous article on how I create a great user experience for shell scripts, the Hacker News community provided valuable feedback and suggestions. I've compiled these insights into six additional techniques to further enhance your shell scripts:

Shell Scripting, Hacker News, User Experience, Programming

4 points by emrah 83 days ago | 1 comments

Setup QEMU Output to Serial Console and Automate Tests with Shell Scripts (2019) (fadeevab.com)
While struggling to automate QEMU guest (communicate and control with the shell scripts), I faced a lot of incomplete, partially working solutions around the Internet. Now, I've got a pretty decent collection of working recipes to tune up a QEMU guest, so I decided to organize all that stuff here, and it could be definitely useful for anyone else.

QEMU, Shell Scripting, Automation, Virtualization, Testing

29 points by transpute 83 days ago | 4 comments

Bash-ini-parser: Advanced bash INI parser library (github.com/lsferreira42)
A robust shell script library for parsing and manipulating INI configuration files in Bash.

Bash, Shell Scripting, Configuration Files, Libraries

35 points by lsferreira42 88 days ago | 32 comments

Self-contained Python scripts with uv (dusktreader.dev)
You can add uv into the shebang line for a Python script to make it a self-contained executable.

Python, Programming, Operating Systems, Shell Scripting, Executable Files

356 points by todsacerdoti 90 days ago | 108 comments

Safe Shell String Interpolation (samwing.dev)
Let's take the toy problem of getting the user's name and printing out a rainbow greeting banner. An inexperienced developer might solve the problem like this:

Security, Programming, Software Development, Shell Scripting, Best Practices

21 points by Wingy 97 days ago | 7 comments

A 6502 emulator written in busybox ash (treehouse.systems)

Emulators, Programming, Shell Scripting, 6502

10 points by todsacerdoti 103 days ago | 0 comments

Xdg-ninja: checking your $HOME for unwanted files and directories (github.com/b3nj5m1n)
A shell script that checks your $HOME for unwanted files and directories.

Shell Scripting, System Optimization, Linux

74 points by plushugh 114 days ago | 29 comments

How to add a note above your files when running `ls` (github.com/gkamer8)
How to create an alias of `ls` that displays a .note file, if it exists.

Linux, Command Line, Shell Scripting, Productivity

7 points by gkamer8 116 days ago | 4 comments

I shouldn't of made this. Another direnv alternative for no reason (willwa.de)
I hate having to do this. But I have.

Software, Development Tools, Shell Scripting

10 points by willwade 129 days ago | 12 comments

Prefer tee -a, not >>, in CI (huonw.github.io)
Shell scripts sometimes have to append data to a file. Redirecting output with >> is the conventional way and works fine, but using tee -a instead is a usually better default, especially in continuous integration. It’s just as easy and gives automatic introspection: the same value is printed to stdout and so appears in normal logs too.

Shell Scripting, Continuous Integration, DevOps, Software Development, Best Practices

4 points by dbaupp 134 days ago | 0 comments

Shell-ish scripting in Go with ease (github.com/bitfield)
script is a Go library for doing the kind of tasks that shell scripts are good at: reading files, executing subprocesses, counting lines, matching strings, and so on.

Go Programming, Shell Scripting, Programming Tools, Software Libraries

140 points by begoon 147 days ago | 65 comments

Find the oldest line in your repo (milofultz.com)
This is how all my projects go. I get a wild hare and then figure out how I can make a shell script to do it. Thanks to some help from people online, I was able to make a script that listed out the oldest lines in a git repo. Kind of fun to see what legacy stuff is still around.

Programming, Git, Shell Scripting

63 points by surprisetalk 152 days ago | 58 comments

Today I learned that bash has hashmaps (2024) (xeiaso.net)
Hashmaps (associative arrays) are a great way to store a bag of key-value data. At work I was writing something that needed me to spawn a bunch of GPU instances, GPU availability is spread out by region and GPU type. I wanted to store a mapping of GPU kind to region name and for some reason I thought it would be a good idea to do it in bash.

Bash, Programming, Shell Scripting, Data Structures

177 points by stefankuehnel 170 days ago | 133 comments

Fish 4.0: The Fish of Theseus (fishshell.com)
About two years ago, our head maintainer @ridiculousfish opened what quickly became our most-read pull request:

Software, Open Source, Programming Languages, Shell Scripting

906 points by jdxcode 181 days ago | 197 comments

Populating env vars using 1Password (coryd.dev)
I love automating things and — with that impulse entirely unchecked — I've written up a shell script to make setting this site up for local development even simpler.

Automation, Development, Shell Scripting, 1Password

7 points by cdme 195 days ago | 0 comments

Biggest shell programs (github.com/oils-for-unix)

Programming, Shell Scripting, Unix

259 points by todsacerdoti 203 days ago | 123 comments

TIL: Some surprising code execution sources in bash (yossarian.net)
I ran across two surprising sources of code execution in bash (and probably other shells) recently.

Security, Bash, Shell Scripting

6 points by todsacerdoti 218 days ago | 0 comments

A Second Search for Bash Scripting Alternatives (monzool.net)
SHELL SCRIPTING IS something most programmers will encounter often – especially if doing dev-ops, automation and general Linux work. Unfortunately we are mostly stuck with bash. There surely must be better alternatives…

Bash Scripting, Shell Scripting, Programming, Automation, Linux

21 points by thunderbong 221 days ago | 49 comments

Resolving a mysterious problem with find (johndcook.com)
Suppose you want to write a shell script searches the current directory for files that have a keyword in the name of the file or in its contents. Here’s a first attempt.

Shell Scripting, Linux, Programming, File System

33 points by chmaynard 227 days ago | 45 comments

Yosild: A single shell script that builds a full, minimal Linux distribution (jm.iq.pl)
Yosild is a single shell script that builds a full, minimal Linux distribution, based on BusyBox. It compiles the latest stable kernel and the latest stable version of the BusyBox. This script can prepare minimalistic Linux system for devices with little hardware resources. Yosild Linux needs just 70 MB RAM and 40 MB storage size. yosild.sh requires minimal Debian or Ubuntu distro to run with the architecture compatible with the target device.

Linux, Operating Systems, Shell Scripting, Minimalism

40 points by ocean_moist 231 days ago | 0 comments

Learn Awk in Y Minutes (learnxinyminutes.com)
AWK is a standard tool on every POSIX-compliant UNIX system. It’s like flex/lex, from the command-line, perfect for text-processing tasks and other scripting needs. It has a C-like syntax, but without mandatory semicolons (although, you should use them anyway, because they are required when you’re writing one-liners, something AWK excels at), manual memory management, or static typing. It excels at text processing. You can call to it from a shell script, or you can use it as a stand-alone scripting language.

Programming Languages, Shell Scripting, Text Processing

12 points by sandwichsphinx 235 days ago | 5 comments

85% of Cursor AI in a Shell Script and Good Prompting (rohan.ga)
This is an example workflow of how to integrate LLMs into your software dev.

Software Development, Artificial Intelligence, Shell Scripting

4 points by ocean_moist 248 days ago | 0 comments

NGS – Next Generation Shell (ngs-lang.org)
Next Generation Shell is a modern programming language that focuses on "DevOps"y use cases.

Programming Languages, DevOps, Shell Scripting

15 points by gurjeet 251 days ago | 4 comments

Abuse ZSH Parameter Expansion to Expand GNU-Style Arguments (blogspot.com)
This method offers exactly one benefit: the target platform I was working with for this project was mingw under Windows and, like WSL1, it had this very painful performance issue when a shell had to create a sub-shell -- basically, any time you $(run something) and that means "if your function returns anything except for an integer", it's going to have a serious cost to place that into a variable the convenient way.

Shell Scripting, ZSH, Performance Optimization, Windows, Linux

26 points by mdip 264 days ago | 3 comments