There are many cases where bash/shell is better than Python. For one, any time you're just stringing together 2-4 existing shell tools, bash has unbeatable speed since it's all running in C. Plus, you should probably learn the tools anyways to handle CLI stuff on a day-to-day level, so the knowledge is reusable and becomes very intuitive to compose into some crazy one-liner piped chains of commands. If I just want to loop over a set of directories and do a couple chained CLI commands on each directory, this is the way I go.

That said, in cases where you're doing something very custom, any time you're doing something that can't be simply described as a chain of CLI tool transformations, and any time you want to maintain a global state across a complex set of operations outside of a pipeline, I agree that Python is generally a more robust solution with much easier maintainability.

[–] jim_stark 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

compose into some crazy one-liner piped chains of commands

Why not something that is completely redesigned from the ground up:

https://www.nushell.sh/

[–] avonarret1 2 points 1 year ago

That looks really elegant. I think I'm gonna give it a try. Thanks a lot for the recommendation!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

have you ever tried to recreate a simple shell pipeline in Python

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

If we’re talking about 5 like script, then sure. Just use bash. But python is much better long term, in my experience, for scripts any bigger than that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Xonsh