Shell

TIL that returning a value from a function in bash doesn’t do what I thought it does. Whenever you call a function that’s returning some value, instead of giving you the value, Bash sets the return value of the callee as the status code of the calling command. Consider this example: #!/usr/bin/bash # script.sh return_42() { return 42 } # Call the function and set the return value to a variable. value=$return_42 # Print the return value. echo $value I was expecting this to print out 42 but instead it doesn’t print anything to the console. Turns out, a shell function doesn’t return the value when it encounters the return keyword. Rather, it stops the execution of the function and sets the status code of the last command in the function as the value that the function returns. ...

I run git log --oneline to list out the commit logs all the time. It prints out a compact view of the git history. Running the command in this repo gives me this: d9fad76 Publish blog on safer operator.itemgetter, closes #130 0570997 Merge pull request #129 from rednafi/dependabot/... 6967f73 Bump actions/setup-python from 3 to 4 48c8634 Merge pull request #128 from rednafi/dependabot/pip/mypy-0.961 5b7a7b0 Bump mypy from 0.960 to 0.961 However, there are times when I need to list out the commit logs that only represent the changes made to a particular file. Here’s the command that does exactly that. ...

While working on a project with EdgeDB1 and FastAPI2, I wanted to perform health checks against the FastAPI server in the GitHub CI. This would notify me about the working state of the application. The idea is to: Run the server in the background. Run the commands against the server that’ll denote that the app is in a working state. Perform cleanup. Exit with code 0 if the check is successful, else exit with code 1. The following shell script demonstrates a similar workflow with a Python HTTP server. This script: ...

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: ...

One thing that came to me as news is that the command which—which is the de-facto tool to find the path of an executable—is not POSIX compliant. The recent Debian debacle1 around which brought it to my attention. The POSIX-compliant way of finding an executable program is command -v, which is usually built into most of the shells. So, instead of doing this: which python3.12 Do this: command -v which python3.12 Debian’s which hunt ↩︎ ...

Pasting shell commands can be a pain when they include hidden return \n characters. In such a case, your shell will try to execute the command immediately. To prevent that, use curly braces { <cmd> } while pasting the command. Your command should look like the following: { dig +short google.com } Here, the spaces after the braces are significant.

Use unofficial bash strict mode while writing scripts. Bash has a few gotchas and this helps you to avoid that. For example: #!/bin/bash set -euo pipefail echo "Hello" Where, -e Exit immediately if a command exits with a non-zero status. -u Treat unset variables as an error when substituting. -o pipefail The return value of a pipeline is the status of the last command to exit with a non-zero status, or zero if no command exited with a non-zero status. References The idea is a less radical version of this post1. I don’t recommend messing with the IFS without a valid reason. ...