Meanwhile I at least 50% want to apologize for it.
I know full well that it is crammed full of inscrutabilities, relies on side effects, implicit behaviours, an ocean of globals & other state, and isn't even fully consistent with internal conventions.
This would be doing a bad job at work.
Some of that is just working with what you have, like the globals are how you avoid needing subshells so that's justified.
But there's other things like a lot of "business logic" is implimented in the form of arcane conditional brace expansions and particular return values of some commands etc, that could have been done more scrutably with ordinary readable explicit logic, just somewhat more verbosely.
I'm the first to say it aint readable. It's really a great example of "just because you CAN do something..."
But I wanted no dependencies (that aren't likely already there), cross platform, doesn't break in 6 months simply because 6 months have passed, yet interpreted vs a c program. Awk would tick the same boxes. I have both awk and ksh scripts I wrote in the 90's on xenix that still work the same today on linux & mac & bsd, meanwhile a python script breaks in a year.
I know full well that it is crammed full of inscrutabilities, relies on side effects, implicit behaviours, an ocean of globals & other state, and isn't even fully consistent with internal conventions.
This would be doing a bad job at work.
Some of that is just working with what you have, like the globals are how you avoid needing subshells so that's justified.
But there's other things like a lot of "business logic" is implimented in the form of arcane conditional brace expansions and particular return values of some commands etc, that could have been done more scrutably with ordinary readable explicit logic, just somewhat more verbosely.
I'm the first to say it aint readable. It's really a great example of "just because you CAN do something..."
But I wanted no dependencies (that aren't likely already there), cross platform, doesn't break in 6 months simply because 6 months have passed, yet interpreted vs a c program. Awk would tick the same boxes. I have both awk and ksh scripts I wrote in the 90's on xenix that still work the same today on linux & mac & bsd, meanwhile a python script breaks in a year.