Modern helpers for shell scripting.
I end up using a lot of shell scripting for portability and efficiency reasons. As designed it is great for glue logic. But shell scripting has a lot of gaps.
modern.sh fills some of these gaps by providing such capabilities as:
- Including scripts as libraries - and ensuring they're only loaded once
- Compatibility stubs and wrappers to ease development between Linux and BSD-like environments
- Best-practice application of shell commands and features (like
safe_cd) - Copious user feedback and visual indicators that are easy to read to aid debugability
There is almost no boilerplate for your entry script to reliably find modern.sh.
If you have modern.sh in your path, you're good to start using it with just:
source "$(which modern.sh)"If you set it up as a library in a relative path and aren't sure where it might end up, then you'll need to do something like this (where libpath is the relative path from your script):
source "$(dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}")/libpath/modern.sh"Pretty much every function is documented in doc/help.ansi, just display it in your terminal or an ansi-capable editor to read more:
cat doc/help.ansiI've used a lot of these functions for many years, copied from project to project, but this version was extracted from my blacklight programming language build scripts.
While I mainly use fish interactively, modern.sh currently heavily depends on bash-isms due to it being readily available on all platforms I have come into contact as well as having a decent set of primitives to build on. While that has been a safe assumption for the last couple of decades, it is no longer the case. Making it zsh compatible will not be a stretch. Eventually modern.sh will grow a deeper compatibility layer to allow it to run on dash and busybox or similar.