Hacker News with Generative AI: Shell Scripting

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

176 points by stefankuehnel 10 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 20 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 34 days ago | 0 comments

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

Programming, Shell Scripting, Unix

259 points by todsacerdoti 42 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 58 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 61 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 67 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 71 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 74 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 88 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 91 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 104 days ago | 3 comments

Whence '\n'? (rodarmor.com)
If you do just foo, the following justfile will write a single byte 0x0A to a file named bar:

Programming, Shell Scripting, File Handling

338 points by lukastyrychtr 105 days ago | 128 comments

A Tour of Hell – Shell scripting Haskell dialect (chrisdone.com)
This set of slides sketches out the implementation of Hell, in technical detail. I do tend to switch between the slides, old code, and the present code, so bear with me. It's more about the ideas. If you want to see a complete implementation, the complete implementation of Hell is one file, which you can look through easily.

Programming, Haskell, Shell Scripting

139 points by kreyenborgi 110 days ago | 23 comments

What was the point of [ "x$var" = "xval" ]? (2021) (vidarholen.net)
In shell scripting you sometimes come across comparisons where each value is prefixed with "x". Here are some examples from GitHub:

Shell Scripting, Programming, Code Analysis, Best Practices

82 points by fanf2 111 days ago | 49 comments

OpenBSD now enforcing no invalid NUL characters in shell scripts (undeadly.org)

Security, OpenBSD, Shell Scripting

185 points by CTOSian 116 days ago | 154 comments

The Dune Shell (adam-mcdaniel.github.io)
Dune is a shell designed for powerful scripting. Think of it as an unholy combination of bash and Lisp.

Shell Scripting, Programming Languages, Open Source, Command Line

240 points by thunderbong 124 days ago | 82 comments

Techniques I use to create a great user experience for shell scripts (nochlin.com)
"You should go and check out the shell script in the repo because it's very nice. It has colored output, it's super safe... it's really a masterclass in terms of writing shell scripts."

Shell Scripting, User Experience, Programming, Best Practices

412 points by hundredwatt 129 days ago | 273 comments

Show HN: Awk Version Comparison Dashboard (megamansec.github.io)

Programming, Tools, Shell Scripting

4 points by mmsc 141 days ago | 0 comments

Show HN: Ward – a file vault written in bash (github.com/oeo)

Security, Shell Scripting, Command Line, Open Source, File Management

20 points by genesishash 145 days ago | 11 comments

The Queueing Shell Game (danslimmon.com)

Shell Scripting, Operating Systems, Performance

11 points by tedchs 146 days ago | 2 comments

Show HN: A shell script to search multiple torrent sites from CLI (github.com/TUVIMEN)