this post was submitted on 05 Mar 2025
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Programmer Humor

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago (17 children)

I'm not very acquainted with any programming language so maybe I'm wrong here (or I didn't get the joke? XD) but bash didn't change much in the past few years, I even read some scripts more than 10 years still works because the syntax stays the same (or doesn't change a lot ...)

Compared with the switch from python 2 -> python 3 I read a lot of people pulling their hair off xD

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago (8 children)

Here's an example, I have looked up many times (like just now), which checks whether a string is empty:

var=""
if [ -z "$var" ]; then
    echo "empty"
else
    echo "not empty"
fi

Why -z? I have no idea. I will also routinely forget the ]; then part. I believe, if you write the then onto the next line, then you don't need the semicolon. And then someone's probably gonna tell me to use double-brackets [[ ]] instead, which probably does something.

Arguably, I never fully learned Bash syntax, but it also is just a stupid if-statement. There shouldn't be that much complexity in it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

You could write that as 1 line:

[ -z "$var" ] && echo "empty" || echo "no it aint"

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