SEsenorsmile·Oct 21, 2020
they also have a pure bash bible: https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible
In Pure sh bible – Posix sh alternatives to external processesdylanaraps
pure-bash-bible
Shell2018–2025
dylanaraps / pure-bash-bible · Archived
pure-bash-bible
📖 A collection of pure bash alternatives to external processes.
28Distinct people
29Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
41.7KGitHub stars
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What it is
📖 A collection of pure bash alternatives to external processes.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
- dylanaraps/pure-sh-bible · linked in 3 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 12:03:30 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year29 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-06-15 12:03:30 UTC to 2025-07-09 19:07:57 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 7 | 6 | 1 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 0 | 4 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 2 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
4 sourcesActually one more thing I realized about this idea that would be wild...
Since re2c itself is written in C, it can be easily compiled to wasm (even if it has a few gotos). So then you get an engine that can compile user patterns at runtime, rather than having it be an offline process.
(I don't really think there is that much difference in constraints between the offline and online processes, as some of have suggested. For example I observed that re2c compile time is linear with respect # constants strings in a large range in that benchmark.)
I have been thinking of embedding wasm in Oil, mainly to do reasonably fast string transformations. Because one goal of Oil is to provide an alternative to extremely tortured string transformation syntax like: https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible
And Oil has the eggex language, that compil
Read the rest
es to egrep syntax, and uses libc's engine.
But it would be cool if it could compile to DFAs with an embedded re2c compiler.
Then again, I was surprised that the compiled C code was not faster than an intepreter for small cases, so maybe this whole thing is too complex for the benefit... I guess I would have to do some up front benchmarks to see if this is even worth it.
It could be that you need an extremely fast wasm engine to make it worthwhile, and all of those are tied to big JS engines and their very non-portable JITs.
[1] https://johnwickerson.wordpress.com/2020/05/21/diagrams-for-...
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edit: found some related comments:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18553393
Surprise, the "totally shocking" result there is due to BACKTRACKING :) Automata-based regex in wasm beats native browser regex because it doesn't backtrack.
While you're at it, for a similar resource check out: https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible and https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-sh-bible
I believe they've been posted here previously.
In Bash FAQAnother great reference is https://github.com/dylanaraps/pure-bash-bible
In The Bash Hackers Wiki