[Haskell-cafe] Re: develop new Haskell shell?

[Aaron Denney]

On 2006-05-12, Jeremy Shaw <jeremy.shaw at linspireinc.com> wrote:
> At Thu, 11 May 2006 23:05:14 +0100,
> Brian Hulley wrote:
>
>> Of course the above could no doubt be improved but surely it is already far 
>> easier to understand and much more powerful than the idiosyncratic text 
>> based approach used in UNIX shells (including rc). 
>
> The idea of representing unix pipes as monads has been around for a
> while -- but what most people fail to account for is that many (most?)
> real-world shell scripts also need to deal with return values and
> stderr. Even standard unix shells are pretty terrible in this regard
> -- so if we could do it *better* than standard shells -- that could be
> pretty compelling.
>
> Here are some simple examples of things to handle, starting with
> failures in a pipeline:
>
>  $ aoeu | cat -n ; echo $?
>  bash: aoeu: command not found
>  0
>  $
>
> Sweet! A successful return code even though there is clearly a
> failure. Bash 3.x *finally* added, set -o pipefail -- which would
> cause the above to return an error. Unfortunately, there is no way to
> tell which part of the pipeline failed, or any way to attempt recovery
> of the part that failed.

See also the "pipestatus/PIPESTATUS" arrays in e.g. zsh and ksh.
Maybe it's in bash too these days.

-- 
Aaron Denney
-><-