Ask HN: Is There a Shell Revival?

I’ve used shell scripts before, but mostly in a pretty limited way with other people’s open source scripts to do something specific, or the occasional one off to clean up a drive.

Ironically, now that agents are genuinely good at coding, I find myself “writing” more shell scripts.

They’re robust, portable, and work in almost any environment I care about. Agents are very comfortable producing them, they execute fast, and they’re great for automation.

What I’ve ended up with is a growing set of automations built around simple, interactive shell script menus that handle things I do all the time. When I want to improve one, add branching logic, or tweak behavior, I just ask AI to mod the script and move on. I kind of love it.

It feels like a shell script revival, at least for me.

Curious if others are experiencing the same shift or if I fell into some weird bubble/anti-pattern.

1 points | by sshadmand 5 hours ago

4 comments

  • bgbntty2 3 hours ago
    I'd make sure the scripts work with edge cases like unexpected characters in file names (new lines and so on), especially if you don't control the names yourself. Maybe prompt the AI to do some tests if that's possible?

    And keep backups. Not because you're using AI, necessarily. And not because you're using shell scripts. But just in case.

    The "bubble" part doesn't concern you. If it works for you, it works for you. Whether or not it's a "bubble" is more of an economic issue at a larger scale.

  • rzzzwilson 4 hours ago
    I too used shell a lot back in the day. I once wrote a 5000+ line system to handle database administration and a bespoke email system with retries to handle flaky communications. But that was a long time ago and requirements that forced the use of shell. These days I still write small shell scripts but for larger scripts I use python. I find that shell is even better when interfacing with a Linux system than python, but python is better at higher-level logic and control.
    [-]
    • sshadmand 2 hours ago
      Interesting. I use a lot of python and nodejs for my apps, maybe this shell angle is a weird quirk I developed for no particular reason. I keep a seperate repo called “manager” and use it to manage my other parts of the stack like, “run tests for each repo, bump version, commit to git” with a single CLI command. I have no idea why that started. My guess is an agent created a shell script and I just went with it and built up around it. Good to hear other perspectives. Thanks!
  • fragmede 5 hours ago
    I mean, they're useful to you, presumably, so who cares if it is a weird bubble. I'll tell you about the weird bubble I've tried. So you start with bash, then python, ask it to do it in rust for speed, and then for shiggles, have it do it in assembly! The problem with assembly is that it's not portable, and I'm currently on a MacBook which is arm, and I still need to be on x86, so maybe I'll try for c (and not c++) next.
    [-]
    • sshadmand 4 hours ago
      There is a reshaping of what we think is “right”. Like, I am less and less interested in SDKs since I can just ask for a lightweight, custom, integration into anything I want based on API docs. I mean, I still use a lot of SDKs…buuuut it feels like I’m forcing the AI to use them for my monkey brain’s sake. Is predefined mashup of structured services even necessary anymore?