On Wed, 7 Sep 2016 15:19:23 -0700
Evan Gates <evan.gates_AT_gmail.com> wrote:
Hey Evan,
> I'm glad you quoted! I do have a couple questions and discussion
> points I'd value your feedback on.
I'll do my best to answer your question.
> Why all the extraneous semicolons? I see this a lot in awk, too. I
> think it tends to be a reflex for C programmers.
Yes it is a reflex. The semicolons don't hurt anybody and I actually am
not that much of a shell-god to really exactly know where I can get rid
of them.
> Why not quote "$ret"? You don't have control over the environment in
> which the user will run the script. I know it sounds stupid, but I
> have literally seen a script run in a case where IFS=0 and if [ $? -ne
> 0 ] broke. And it was a legitimate usage.
I don't know about such environments. The question is if $? would ever
return something that is something else than a number.
> And the following purely style questions:
>
> What are your thoughts on
> FORMAT=$(file -ib "$TMP") FORMAT=${FORMAT%;*}
> instead of using the file | cut? I tend towards using shell parameter
> expansion instead of piping. I think I started to do so in order to
> save the fork and pipe, but now it just comes more naturally to me.
I honestly have to say that I'm not comfortable with those shell-tricks
and in my opinion this lowers readability very much. If this was a part
of the script that was executed 1 million times I would think about
using "shell-native" functions, but this is just done once and you
immediately see what it does because cut(1) is a common tool.
For shells, I like to go for the UNIX approach. Use the provided Posix
tools to solve a task and avoid builtin stuff, especially magic syntax,
as much as possible.
> I still highly recommend not using all cap variables. I'm not sure
> where the trend started, I don't see it in any other language (does
> pop up in makefiles).
I will think about making this change, but will wait for your feedback
on above so I could pack this into one commit.
Cheers
FRIGN
--
FRIGN <dev_AT_frign.de>
Received on Thu Sep 08 2016 - 00:26:53 CEST