[Rediscover]

It's time for me to re-read the man page for bash. I was not aware of BASH_REMATCH, wow. It's in the first snippet on the linked page, and would save the hassle of using multiple var expansions of the %% and ## et al sort.

[alganet]

Yes, but also:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DashAsBinSh#Why_was_this_change_made...

> [bash] is rather large and slow to start up and operate by comparison with dash

For more complex regular expressions, you can use `sed`.

--

It's all a matter of context. Sometimes simple ## and %% param substitutions are the best tool for the job.

I think bash is a fantastic interactive shell and a lousy script runner.

[Calzifer]

Bash is slower than other POSIX compatible shells but once you start running external commands for any substring or replace operation you loose much of this performance edge since forking is comparable slow.

One reason why I personally prefer to use Bashisms like ${x//str/replace} or [[ $value =~ $pattern ]] instead of doing the common x=$(echo $x | sed s/str/replace/) which has to launch two processes just for the sake of avoiding Bashism. (or grep -oP ... which is nice but a BASH_REMATCH is often simpler)

[tecleandor]

Oh yeah! I was unaware too! Nowadays I quickly jump to python instead of using Bash even for the simplest of scripts , but this could help creating tiny and easy to understand scripts for some integrations...

[enriquto]

> I quickly jump to python instead of using Bash even for the simplest of scripts

You don't seem to respect the old, venerable, well-tested adage: "once your shell script becomes too complex, switch to a real programming language like python".

Or, the zen version (formally equivalent, but with quite a different tone): "once your program becomes sufficiently simple, turn it into a beautiful shell script".

[couscouspie]

How do you actually read man pages? Do you skim them, to actually read and focus on interesting parts? Do you try to memorize features?