Perl was written to write more complicated bash scripts. It's so seamless to call and handle shell commands and the first class regexes make it terse in a way that's appropriate for this use case.
I declare a `my_die() { echo "$" 1>&2; exit 1; }` on top of each file. Makes life easier by knowing why the script failed instead of having only exit code or having to turn `set -x` on and rerun.
Only if I could somehow mix `if` & `set -e`in a readable way... I wanted it to only capture errors of explicit `return 1` from bash functions, not from commands within those bash functions. But I guess I'm doing too much* of the job in bash now and it's getting messy.
bash is glue. write long sequences of command in it. maybe one or two if statements for testing if a file exists. but the minute you start putting branching logic into it.. it's time to reach for another tool.
#!/usr/bin/env bash
set -eEuo pipefail # pipefail bash 4.2+, which is basically everything. There's a longer version for backwards compatibility, but it's rare.
die() {
echo >&2 "ERROR: $*"
exit 1
}
# e= & exit preserves the original exit code
# trap - ... prevents multiple cleanup() calls
# To only run on error instead of always, replace both EXITs with ERR
trap 'e=$?; trap - EXIT; cleanup; exit $e' EXIT
cleanup() {
: # Delete this line and place cleanup code here.
}
# Minimal script here.
# Use semantic-named functions.
# DRY.
# Don't use many levels of indentation.
# All ordinary variables must be defined before use, so use checks like [[ -n "${X-}" ]]
# All pipeline and bare command non-zero exit codes are errors.
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