Bash – $(( )) vs. $[]

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 05 December 2012 14:40:51 Oliver Grawert did opine:

> hi,
> 
> Am Mittwoch, den 05.12.2012, 18:00 +0100 schrieb Johnny Rosenberg:
> > 2012/12/5 Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com>:
> > > hi,
> > > 
> > > Am Dienstag, den 04.12.2012, 18:47 +0100 schrieb Johnny Rosenberg:
> > >> 2012/12/4 Oliver Grawert <ogra at ubuntu.com>:
> > >> Disadvantages, such as?
> > > 
> > > size, slowness, the fact that dash as a system shell has most likely
> > > all depending libs in ram already and the fact that bash uses
> > > unportable shell dialect enhancements
> > 
> > That doesn't seem to me to be a big problem, since bash seems to be
> > installed by default in most systems anyway. And if not, it's not that
> > hard to install it. I'm only writing scripts for my own use anyway (I
> > am pretty sure nobody else would want them anyway).
> 
> oh, yeah, dont get me wrong, bash is surely one of the best user shells
> existing ... its just not great as a system shell due to all the
> overhead it has to carry to make it user friendly.
> 
> ciao
> 	oli

It may not be so 'user-friendly' but its the sharpest swiss army knife we 
have.  Much of the automation in mail handling is from bash scripts I 
wrote.

Likewise, I am keeping a local repo for an legacy computer here, and as I 
code its handy to have a printer for hard copies of my assembly drivel.  

There are NO printers for sale today that a TRS-80 Color Computer can drive 
with its pure text listing output.  So I have a ser-usb on that port, send 
it up the cable to this machine, which then feeds it thru cups and back to 
a $110 B&W Brother laser printer on that machines desk in the basement.  

Its absolutely the best looking output that machine has ever had, and at 22 
pages a minute, easily 40x faster than its next best lashup, which was a 
xerox 1650-ro, a 40 cps daisy wheel I can't get one time ribbons for 
anymore, they are too old & shatter like glass on the first hammer strike.

If I had to write all that in C and build it, I probably could, but bash 
gets the job done while I am writing an outline framework for the C 
version.  Maybe its slow, but slow is relative on a quad core phenom. :)

The longest delay is the drum warmup in the printer, about 4 or 5 seconds.  
Whats not to like?

Cheers, Gene
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