Bash is a really great shell, but consider trying out a functional shell scripting language like Elvish (which is also a shell). Syntatically it’s pretty similar and not hard to pickup, but it’s stupid powerful. A cool example is updating different servers via ssh in parallel using a servers.json file;
[
{"name": "server.com", "user": "root", "identity": "~/.ssh/private_key0", "cmd": "apt update; apt upgrade -y"},
{"name": "serverb.com", "user": "root", "identity": "~/.ssh/private_key1", "cmd": "pacman -Syu"},
{"name": "serverc.com", "user": "root", "identity": "~/.ssh/private_key2", "cmd": "apk update; apk upgrade"}
]
and a little elvish magic;
var hosts = (from-json < servers.json)
peach {|h|
ssh $h[user]@$h[name] -i $h[identity] $h[cmd] > ssh-$h[name].log
} $hosts
Just run the script and boom, done. You can even swap out peach which is parallel each for each if you want to do each command procedurally–but I really love using peach, especially with file operations over many different files. Linux is fast, but peach is fuckin’ crazy fast. Especially for deleting files (fd -e conf -t file | peach {|x| rm $x }, or one thing that I do is extract internal subs (so they play on my chromecast) in my Jellyfin server, using elvish makes it really fast;
fd -e mkv | peach {|x| ffmpeg -i $x -map 0:s:0 $x.srt }
Find all *.mkv files, pass the filenames through ffmpeg (using peach) and extract the first subtitle as filename.mkv.srt. Takes only about a few seconds to do thousands and thousands of video files. I highly recommend it for home-labbers.
Pretty dumb example, but peach is like 6x faster;
❯ time { range 0 1000 | each {|x| touch $x.txt }}
5.2591751s
❯ time { range 0 1000 | peach {|x| touch $x.txt }}
776.2411ms
Agreed.