The paradox of POSIX

NOTE TO SELF: The point of this article is to say that POSIX exists to provide a common environment

TODO: re-read the origins of posix. i seem to recall some interesting quotes from stallman about it.

I’ve seen a lot hand wringing over the years about writing POSIX-compatible shell scripts. Since POSIX shell is so restrictive, people go to great pains to accomplish this.

But getting a system without one of the common shells like Bash or Korn or even zsh is super rare. The real problem is all of the other tools.

I’ve been moving from Slackware Linux to OpenBSD on several of my personal computers, I’ve had to make changes to a number of my scripts and aliases to accommodate the differences.

My solution has been to rewrite my shell tools in Ruby, which makes it so much easier to write them that i usually end up adding some nice-to-have additional features while i’m at it.

The enormous advantage of Ruby is that the language and core libraries that ship with it provide 90% of what I need in terms of functionality. And for what it doesn’t provide, I just shell out. No problem!

(if I don’t already, i need a card talking about how Ruby is actually a serious contender for best cli scripting language so i can link it here - i completely ignore the object-oriented stuff, use globals, etc. it’s great)

I struggle to imagine someday ending up on a system that doesn’t support Ruby.