Programming

Looking at the example

Why does the generated bash look like that? Is this more safe somehow than a more straighforward bash if or does it just generate needlessly complicated bash?

As a long-time bash, awk and sed scripter who knows he'll probably get downvoted into oblivion for this my recommendation: learn PowerShell

It's open-source and completely cross-platform - I use it on Macs, Linux and Windows machines - and you don't know what you're missing until you try a fully objected-oriented scripting language and shell. No more parsing text, built-in support for scalars, arrays, hash maps/associative arrays, and more complex types like version numbers, IP addresses, synchronized dictionaries and basically anything available in .Net. Read and write csv, json and xml natively and simply. Built-in support for regular expressions throughout, web service calls, remote script execution, and parallel and asynchronous jobs and lots and lots of libraries for all kinds of things.

Seriously, I know its popular and often-deserved to hate on Microsoft but PowerShell is a kick-ass, cross-platform, open-source, modern shell done right, even if it does have a dumb name imo. Once you start learning it you won't want to go back to any other.

Why not compile it to sh though.

There's a joke here but I'm not clever enough to make it.

Basically another shell scripting language. But unlike most other languages like Csh or Fish, it can compile back to Bash. At the moment I am bit conflicted, but the thing it can compile back to Bash is what is very interesting. I'll keep an eye on this. But it makes the produced Bash code a bit less readable than a handwritten one, if that is the end goal.

curl -s "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Ph0enixKM/AmberNative/master/setup/install.sh" | $(echo /bin/bash)

I wish this nonsense of piping a shell script from the internet directly into Bash would stop. It's a bad idea, because of security concerns. This install.sh script eval and will even run curl itself to download amber and install it from this url

url="https://github.com/Ph0enixKM/${__0_name}/releases/download/${__2_tag}/amber_${os}_${arch}" ... echo "Please make sure that root user can access /opt directory.";

And all of this while requiring root access.

I am not a fan of this kind of distribution and installation. Why not provide a normal manual installation process and link to the projects releases page: https://github.com/Ph0enixKM/Amber/releases BTW its a Rust application. So one could build it with Cargo, for those who have it installed.

I checked the docs, and I'm a bit confused with one thing. They show that you can capture the stdout of a command into a variabe, but they never show stderr being captured. How would that work?