72 engineers on Hacker News describe using Bash first-hand: 9 endorse it, 16 regret it, 3 are mixed.
“Been doing bash scripting for years. Tried Go recently, on my, it's so much better for everything OS scripting.”
regret · personal · wltr · 2026-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“instead of ~200 lines of cursed, buggy bash.”
regret · production · diarrhea · 2025-12-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“if you follow the philosophy of using bash as your CI so it runs locally, then you can use the same CI logic on sourcehut and Github Actions”
endorse · production · chubot · 2025-08-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using vscode in java because of the cumbersome file navigation in bash.”
regret · personal · beacon294 · 2024-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“every time I use it for anything slightly complicated I regret it”
regret · personal · bbkane · 2024-12-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Little things like that add up after you've spent years wrestling with bash scripts.”
regret · production · gurgeous · 2024-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I never again wanted to deal with bash and its endless quirks and brittleness”
regret · personal · Aurelius108 · 2024-09-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“bash works great and you can do a lot with it”
endorse · personal · zer00eyz · 2024-04-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“this Go \ bash ecosystem works for us, is easy to manage, and limits dependencies overall”
endorse · production · cloudyporpoise · 2022-07-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“No, it's a bad tool that guiles the user into holding it wrong. There are better tools that are easier to hold.”
regret · production · deathanatos · 2022-03-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I prefer using bash + gnu utils (envsubst & see) and kustomize than playing around with a template language”
endorse · production · atmosx · 2021-11-17 · source ↗ · wrong label?“if I'm not careful they get painfully complex and I tend to regret not writing it in perk”
regret · personal · midasuni · 2021-10-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have a lot of experience writing Bash scripts and I regret It.”
regret · personal · louwrentius · 2020-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've written many thousand lines of code in bash ... Never again!”
regret · production · flavious · 2019-05-25 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've enjoyed the ease Bash provides for scripting, compared to doing the same thing in Node or Python.”
endorse · personal · catacombs · 2018-12-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I always regret writing bash scripts, which start really simple, but tr require refactoring into perl after a few days.”
regret · personal · isostatic · 2018-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“yes I have built reliable systems in Bash... it can be a complete nightmare to work with if you're not proficient”
mixed · production · laumars · 2018-05-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“shell is the one thing that just works, is easily readable, is easily documented, is fairly easy to write”
endorse · production · arca_vorago · 2017-04-01 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the resulting mix of single, double, and escaped quotes was a bit too hacky even for me”
regret · personal · probably_wrong · 2016-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“a lot of the dev workflow has moved out of, say, Visual Studio and into a command line. This is great”
endorse · production · yawgmoth · 2016-08-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I use bash pretty regularly in the devops/sysadmin world pretty often. It can do some wonders, but it has some /serious/ issues.”
mixed · production · bpchaps · 2015-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“When I start writing something in bash, because of those few things it makes so easy (e.g. running subprocesses), I usually regret it as the script grows.”
regret · personal · ptx · 2015-03-16 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I don't regret the time spent because I picked up a lot of transferrable skills from command line utilities and bash.”
mixed · personal · aleem · 2014-09-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have never been able to write more than ten lines of bash-level scripting without saying "Screw this, it's unreadable and unmaintainable"”
regret · production · kabdib · 2013-12-29 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Things I have become an expert in that are now useless to me and probably not valued by an employer”
regret · production · pkteison · 2013-10-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I wish I'd never even started with bash!”
regret · personal · tome · 2012-07-23 · source ↗ · wrong label?“it has bash and the tools I use work the same way they will on the linux boxes I deploy to.”
endorse · production · earl · 2012-06-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Our tasks and scripts are currently just Bash, but they're relatively nice Bash”
neutral · production · pxc · 2025-12-15 · source ↗ · wrong label?“replaced Bash scripts with Bun shell for setup and CI scripts.”
neutral · production · linkage · 2025-12-02 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I instead just send everything like that to bash.”
neutral · personal · esrh · 2025-10-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We were drifting toward a bespoke Bash mess to keep dev and prod in sync.”
neutral · production · 18nleung · 2025-10-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the services we run are typically self-contained golang binaries that we can deploy with bash onto baremetal.”
neutral · production · elevation · 2025-08-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“The whole deployment process is done in a bash script which uses the git hash for versioning”
neutral · production · hauxir · 2024-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“either we use bash or Python for the recipe.”
neutral · production · BeetleB · 2024-12-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was using two other languages other than SQL on a daily basis as well (Perl and Bash)”
neutral · production · tharkun__ · 2024-12-04 · source ↗ · wrong label?“my very basic inhouse solution ... is ~30 lines of bash, which is ran by cron every day”
neutral · production · timcambrant · 2024-05-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“20 years of muscle memory writing bash / python / perl / awk / sql / ruby / JS / CSS selectors”
neutral · production · 20 yr · seanp2k2 · 2023-11-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“building k8s clusters from scratch via terraform and bash scripting.”
neutral · production · 7 yr · jml78 · 2023-08-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I don't have to worry about forgetting to write `set -euo pipefail` because it does it for me.”
neutral · personal · _dain_ · 2022-12-31 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I sometimes regret having built up tons of Bash aliases, because in the long term it ends up with me not really knowing half the tools I use”
neutral · personal · frou_dh · 2022-12-20 · source ↗ · wrong label?“we have helm charts and a bunch of bash scripts etc.”
neutral · production · RamblingCTO · 2022-02-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“My shell-script solution I've been using for the last year or two”
neutral · personal · 2 yr · ranma42 · 2021-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have some bash functions which get/set these defaults, so I will typically make sure I know what I am running against”
neutral · production · verdverm · 2021-11-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using bash for about 30 years, and at this point, sheer inertia means it's unlikely I'll ever switch away.”
neutral · personal · 30 yr · LeoPanthera · 2020-12-21 · source ↗ · wrong label?“so we use bind -x and "pretend that you typed in the edit call manually"”
neutral · personal · FeepingCreature · 2020-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“bash script install things, and use native package managers like pip install”
neutral · production · nojvek · 2020-01-28 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use getopt style command line parameter parsing in at least Java, Perl, Python, and BASH at work”
neutral · production · ohithereyou · 2019-12-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I've been using bash since the 90s, and really got into Powershell a couple of years ago”
neutral · personal · nailer · 2018-12-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Simple scripts, bash until they need their first 'if' or flag or loop, then Go too.”
neutral · production · EricBurnett · 2018-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“everything is done via ansible/repeatable deploys (and some python and bash scripts).”
neutral · production · noir_lord · 2018-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I wrote a bash script that extracted those dependencies and created a graphviz dot file.”
neutral · personal · Izkata · 2017-12-19 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I still write scripts in bash for compatibility (when I have to)”
neutral · personal · djsumdog · 2017-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“adddition transitionally compat with bash or zsh”
neutral · production · zaphirplane · 2017-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I have a lot of muscle memory with bash-isms which also work in ZSH.”
neutral · personal · dijit · 2017-12-13 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Incoming invoices are frequent -> write a bash script, Outgoing invoices are frequent -> write a bash script.”
neutral · production · jdemler · 2017-11-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“use a self-written bash script as "init script"”
neutral · production · mschuster91 · 2017-10-27 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I wrote most of the CLI for Eclipse Che and Codenvy (in bash!!).”
neutral · production · TylerJewell · 2017-06-18 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the bash build script is 177 LoC and is driven by a standard build script”
neutral · production · doki_pen · 2015-07-10 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I write mostly write C, Bash, Python, Go, Puppet.”
neutral · production · sleepydog · 2015-07-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“just some simple orchestration stuff for the local machine written in bash”
neutral · production · hootener · 2015-06-30 · source ↗ · wrong label?“pointing /bin/bash at /bin/dash and making a separate /bin/bash-really.”
neutral · personal · danielweber · 2014-10-08 · source ↗ · wrong label?“the servers in question had been successfully patched (twice!!) immediately after the Bash issue became public.”
neutral · production · secalex · 2014-10-06 · source ↗ · wrong label?“CGI scripts do get written in bash, and people often often make use of sudo within them. I've seen such a beast in production at multiple companies.”
neutral · production · dsl · 2014-09-26 · source ↗ · wrong label?“Here is the bash alias I have been using for CLI JSON formatting”
neutral · personal · tedchs · 2012-11-09 · source ↗ · wrong label?“All of ServiceStack's live demos are deployed using simple bash scripts.”
neutral · production · mythz · 2012-10-22 · source ↗ · wrong label?“I was putting my dotfiles into github and spend a lot of time on OSX and Linux so was merging the two sets.”
neutral · personal · jwecker · 2012-08-11 · source ↗ · wrong label?“To me I think of it as Bash bindings, because that is where I learned them.”
neutral · personal · Periodic · 2011-11-12 · source ↗ · wrong label?“For the same reason we use Java, C++, Scala, Perl, Closure, Bash, JavaScript, etc...”
neutral · production · linuxhansl · 2011-11-07 · source ↗ · wrong label?“more than half of the code is bash.”
neutral · production · choogi · 2011-03-05 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We use monit combined with a number of helper bash scripts running in cron.”
neutral · production · jberryman · 2010-10-24 · source ↗ · wrong label?“We have a bash script which grabs the latest Phing config/property files and then Phing handles the rest...”
neutral · production · dclaysmith · 2010-10-14 · source ↗ · wrong label?