BAbaxuz·Oct 28, 2022
I switched to https://github.com/google/zx. I'm tired of working with strings and prefer actual data structures.
In Shell script best practices, from a decade of scripting thingsgoogle
zx
JavaScript2021–2025
google / zx
zx
A tool for writing better scripts
30Distinct people
45Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
45.8KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A tool for writing better scripts
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
I really love writing with zx. https://github.com/google/zx We have some folks who have gone wild copy-pasting random fancy bash snippets into various developer helpers…
jauntywundrkind used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- shelljs/shelljs · linked in 2 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, 10:49:33 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 year45 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-05-06 19:58:03 UTC to 2025-04-21 20:34:45 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 4 | 9 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 2 | 6 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 8 | 1 | 7 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 14 | 4 | 10 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
8 sourcesi really appreciate zx[1] for putting the scripting into javascript. just a couple super small tweaks/libraries & js becomes much simpler to script.
there's also a deno port[2].
[1] https://github.com/google/zx
[2] https://deno.land/x/zx_deno@1.2.2
In Perl is still relevantI feel like ZX has these features already. Rather than choosing to believe there is a meaningful unbridgeable hard fast line, I think it's beneficial to consider case-by-case what features & capabilities are important & what enables smooth, light operation.
Node still isnt `perl -pie` level easy & hybrid, but again I think it's altogether pretty slick & simple with zx today.
The interactive repl doesnt look like a shell but it has quite advanced editing, comes out ahead in many ways (value previews). There's no ability to generate new autocompletion capabilities in the built in repl, but one could potentially yse an IDE and LSP with a repl. The potential for non-monolithic shells is interesting, that a shell might be separated into editor, engine, & plugins.
There is pretty ok pipeline handling via streams, which finally have decent & wel
Read the rest
l embraced standards. https://github.com/google/zx/blob/main/docs/pipelines.md
Formatting as final step Im not as familiar with but it sounds like one could easily map or swizzle their stream output pretty easily. Particularly with better ndjson I think the potential here is high.
Overall I think there are distinctions, characterizations between shell and other languages, but it's less inherent to me; we simply havent spent much effort identifying what it is that makes operating the command line easy, flexible, and have even less work trying to port those ideas & riff off them. Even an early simple thin standard library like zx achieving so much success at becoming putty or glue, alike a shell, so quickly, indicates to me that it's worth doubting our long held certainty that these things are absolutely apart & different.
Curl, jq is the good answer here.
More from the fringe, I'm quite enjoying zx, a really nodejs powered scripting environment. https://github.com/google/zx
Covered somewhat in ZX 3.0 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28195580 (189 points, 8 months ago, 163 points)
In Jeffrey Snower was originally demoted over PowerShellHas anyone else used https://github.com/google/zx here?
I've started using that instead of bash script and js/node/deno scripts. it's kind of a nice combination of things.
the only pain with this is writing to files. > doesn't just work.
In The temptation of writing shell scripts, illustratedI am not a big fan of the complex literate programming style involving code-generation which this article talks about.
But I recently discovered that Google's zx [1] scripting utility supports executing scripts in markdown documents and I combined it with httpie [2] and usql [3] for a bit of quick and dirty automation testing and api verification code and it worked out pretty well.
I imagine for most people nowadays jupyter or vscode notebooks are the closest it comes to practical literate programming.
[1] https://github.com/google/zx#markdown-scripts
[2] https://github.com/httpie/httpie
[3] https://github.com/xo/usql
In Literate programming is much more than just commenting code