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To me it's about half way there. The things I like about it the least are the ones that are like bash ("I'd just like to interject for a moment, what you're referring to as Bash is in fact called POSIX shell").

A common argument in defense of its weirdness is that "shell scripting isn't like serious software development", but I don't understand that either.

I use shell scripts a good amount because "it's right there" is a strong argument, but in a lot of cases things that seem like they would be trivial take forever, are horribly hacky and leave me wishing I just had written a Python script right away instead.

I really don't get why people like shell scripts.



People like shell scripts because you have one interface: text

For example: you need to write an image to a USB stick. Python: pretty lengthy BASH: image > /dev/SDA

Both will do exactly the same, but one is a few lines of python the other just one line in bash.


Why a throwaway for this? Is this a gpt response?

Also it's not right. You need to do something like image.img <cat> /dev/sda


Why a throwaway? I am on my phone with no access to my real password. Don't get bothered by it?!

Did this look like a proper bash command to you?! Maybe that was some runable python code?!

File ending has nothing to do with its contents. Image.img could be an mp3.

Stop hairsplitting.


Not upset but I am touchy about gpt results. The ending wasn't the key part, the <cat> was the key part. I added img because that's the only image type I can think of that makes sense to write to sda in that way.

Why would anyone write an mp3 to a block device bit by bit


    dd if=<image> of=<output device> bs=<block size>
I use this whenever I need to bake an image to a USB stick.


Always append status=progress and conv=fdatasync Makes sure that the buffer is flushed to disk before finishing.


Of course. That's the right way to do it. I was pointing out that what was written isn't right in any situation and the smallest change to make it make sense would be adding <cat> in the middle

Turns out my answer was wrong too :D. Should have been <image.img cat >/dev/sda. Oh well




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