I can’t think of a single reason to use bash over Python. Anything you can do in bash can be done in pure Python. Unless you’re working in some embedded environment it’s a non-issue to install a Python interpreter (you certainly already have one). I would only use sh/bash for packages I’m distributing to avoid the external dependency, and then only if it’s a relatively simple script.
Python is superior for string anything (parsing, searching, manipulating). But Bash is much simpler for running existing CLI tools. Plus you should already be using Bash as a simple terminal language already, so wrapping what you’re used to into a simple script flows naturally.
Eg, if I have some admin tool for updating a user thingamajig, a common scripting need is just running that tool for every user in a file (or the output of another command). The string manipulation that often requires is annoying in bash, but running the commands is easier than Python.
Bash is much better for doing file operations and piping the output across multiple commands
BASH has some useful features and I’ve literally never had an environment with bash unavailable (even if a package is needed, so what).
MacOS ships only 3.something version, which has some compatibility issues with Bash 4+.
I know whatever environment I run my shell script in has sh, I can’t rely on (the right version of) python being there.
Because you could be on another machine that doesn’t have Python 3.X it only has 3.X-1. or you could write code for Python 3.12 and then four years later no one has 3.12 anymore.
Sometimes you need to download packages from pip but pip might not be available or you may be hitting your company’s internal pip mirror.
Python is never the right answer!
I know there’s a lot of downvotes because there are people reading this as hate toward Python. On one hand, one can make the case that it is overused and this doesn’t bold well for those that simply can never like it’s syntax. On the other hand, Python is perfect for small scripts that isn’t tailored for a Domain or just quick codes.
Honestly, I’m not really a fan of the formatting and syntax of Python but I agree, it is a fine choice for scripting things quickly if you don’t mind the language itself.
The biggest issue I have with it are all the incompatible versions, juggling modules, having some other random thing with a ridiculous configuration, where a bash script would be infinitely easier. Anything more complicated and Python is just too much of a headache.
Python is the second best language for everything. Having one language that does it all is better than learning several that might do it a little bit better.
Careful, that attitude is how we ended up with this infestation of JavaScript!
JavaScript is very much not the second best language for anything.
JavaScript came about because it was the only choice in the context for which it was designed, and then it metasticized into other contexts because devs that used it got Stockholm syndrome.
Python is the best “glue” language I’ve ever used. When you want to chain together your program’s high-level logic and all of the loops happen inside lower-level languages like Rust, Go, Zig, D or C, Python’s performance is perfectly adequate and it’s so clear and concise it reads like pseudocode.
As long as you do all your lookups with dicts or sets performance is pretty decent for smaller workloads.
Speed is a serious problem in Python though. Python has its use cases, and so do other languages. Things would not end well if we started using Python for everything.
Things that could have been done in bash is python’s best usecase. And bash sucks for scripting. Why not python?
Not really true. Python was created for, and is still best used for data science. It’s user-friendliness made it a first for many inexperienced programmers too, and it started to be used for way more than it was initially intended. I’m not saying it’s bad at everything else, but there’s most certainly better tools for the job.
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.
compose into some crazy one-liner piped chains of commands
Why not something that is completely redesigned from the ground up:
Friends don’t let friends do string manipulation in bash.
