My biggest complaint about "idiomatic" shell scripting is the use of the [ and [[ operators. It gives the illusion that [ or [[ are part of the shell syntax when actually they're just programs / builtins / functions which communicate with the rest of the script the same way (most) other things interact -- setting exit status. Specifically this means if .. then .. fi works with any program not just [ [[ operators.
Traditional shell might be:
grep -q thing < file
if [ $? -eq 0 ] ; then echo "thing is there ; fi
VS just using if to look at the ES of the prior program
if
grep -q thing < file
then
echo "thing is there"
fi
"test" and [[ are a fine programs / tools for evaluating strings, looking at file system permissions, doing light math, but it isn't the only way to interact with conditionals.
Traditional shell might be:
VS just using if to look at the ES of the prior program "test" and [[ are a fine programs / tools for evaluating strings, looking at file system permissions, doing light math, but it isn't the only way to interact with conditionals.