Dealing with this at work right now. Digging through thousands of lines of Bash. This script wasn’t written a long time ago, so no clue why they went with Bash.
The script works but it always feels like something is going to break if I look at the code the wrong way.
If you have thousands of lines of bash, don't like maintaining it, but don't necessarily want to rewrite the whole thing at once, that's what https://www.oilshell.org/ is for!
(I created the project and the wiki page. Right now the best bet is to join https://oilshell.zulipchat.com/ if it interests you. People who want to test it out should be comfortable with compiling source tarballs, which is generally trivial because shells have almost no dependencies.)
The first step is:
shopt --set strict:all # at the top of the file
Or to run under bash
shopt -s strict:all 2>/dev/null || true
And then run with "osh myscript.bash"
OSH should run your script exactly the same as bash, but with better error messages, and precise source locations.
And you will get some strictness errors, which can help catch coding bugs. It's a little like ShellCheck, except it can detect things at runtime, whereas ShellCheck can't.
I spent far too many hours playing Trade Wars. It's really a game that I think would probably do well with a reboot. Such amazing depth, room for unlimited players, and such a great strategic layer.
There was also that one game where you went deep down into some dungeon, and had the option of taking various drugs for buffs while also dealing with side effects. It was weird, and fun.
RIP ICQ. I met met quite a few long distance chat friends on there. Never met anyone in person from there, though.
In my area, we had the Cleveland Freenet with an IRC server. Met a lot of friends in real life from there—I believe they also had periodic picnic meetups but I never went to one of those. Briefly dated someone in HS after we met in an IRC channel, and one of my real life friends met his future wife on a freenet in neighboring state that we could access.
I also had a personal site that a random girl my age a few states over found. She emailed me and we started corresponding for years over email, AOL/AIM and hand written letters. We still do on occasion. We met in person about 13 years after we first emailed.
