Don't add extensions to shell executables

I was browsing through the source code of Tom Christie’s typesystem¹ library and discovered that the shell scripts² of the project don’t have any extensions attached to them. At first, I found it odd, and then it all started to make sense.

Executable scripts can be written in any language and the users don’t need to care about that. Also, not gonna lie, it looks cleaner this way.

GitHub uses this [pattern]³ successfully to normalize their scripts. According to the pattern, every project should have a folder named scripts with a subset or superset of the following files:

script/bootstrap – installs/updates all dependencies
script/setup – sets up a project to be used for the first time
script/update – updates a project to run at its current version
script/server – starts app
script/test – runs tests
script/cibuild – invoked by continuous integration servers to run tests
script/console – opens a console

typesystem ↩︎
Scripts without extension ↩︎
Scripts to rule them all - GitHub Blog ↩︎

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