On Fri, Mar 19, 2021 at 09:10:06PM -0400, Dale R. Worley wrote:
> Alex fxmbsw7 Ratchev <fxmb...@gmail.com> writes:
> > yea well it does wonders, however was looking for a way without spawning
> > externals like gawk.. maybe in future there will be =)
>
> Traditionally, shell scripts depended on external binaries to do a lot
> of the processing. At the least, what newer shells do with "{NNN..MMM}"
> and "[[" used to be done by "seq" and "test" a/k/a "[". And what can be
> done by the complex parameter expansions ${...%...} and ${...#...} was
> done by "sed".
Partly true. seq(1) is a Linux thing, and was never part of any
tradition, until Linux people started doing it. Of note, it does not
exist on any other systems. Some BSDs have jot(1) which does a similar
thing, though. Counting in POSIX sh involves a while loop, and i=$((i+1)).
(Before POSIX, it involved using expr(1) for every increment, which
is simply abominable.)
test or [ has been a builtin in every common shell for ages. The days
of shells without a builtin test command are long gone. The difference
between [[ and test is not really significant, if you're using the
operators that are shared between them (e.g. test -f "$f").
The % and # parameter expansions have been around since ksh88, and are
standardized in POSIX. You may be thinking of ${var//old/new} which
is not part of POSIX, and would definitely have been done in sed(1).
While I'm nitpicking your details, you are correct about your overall
point, which is that shells are designed to use external tools to get
things done. There's certainly a large grey area of tasks that can be
done by builtins or by external tools, of course, but beyond a certain
point, trying to force a shell to act like a Real Programming Language
is just not reasonable.
