This problem is not exclusive to bash, try copy-pasting python 2 code into python 3.

Or ES2020 code in a browser.

Or ASM z80 into an x86 program.

When you're copy-pasting, you should be aware of what you're copying, and where you're pasting it.

Surely, no domain in IT is idiot-proof.

> This problem is not exclusive to bash, try copy-pasting python 2 code into python 3.

No, it is highly exclusive to Bash actually. In Bash, even one-character mistakes have a high potential to cause catastrophic damage. Just splitting or globbing on the wrong character can wipe your filesystem. As well as issues like these, where your string being '!' suddenly causes the command to be interpreted entirely differently. And Bash has modes that keep going when there is an error so it's not like you'll even know you've encountered an error or get any kind of visible crash + stack trace necessarily. It just keeps trashing everything further and further. These are extremely wildly different from Python.

> Surely, no domain in IT is idiot-proof.

I would love to know what happens when you say this to a user who pastes your Bash in zsh. Do you tell them your code isn't idiot-proof? Is everyone who ends up running Bash in zsh for some reason or another an idiot?

If you're not doing `set -euo` and if you run your scripts as root before testing them, you're asking for something wrong to happen.

EDIT in response to your EDIT:

My users get either:

  - a tar.gz archive
  - a binary
  - a docker image
  - an helm chart
  - a POSIX shell script (very rare)

Then they can use any method they want to deploy it.

You want your software to be portable? You have to put in the work to do it.

If you expect your users to know better (assume they ARE idiots), again, you're asking for something wrong to happen.

You mean "set -euo pipefail", don't you?

You should use more copy/paste. ;)

> If you're not doing `set -euo` and if you run your scripts as root before testing them, you're asking for something wrong to happen.

...because you can't delete important files unless you're root, right? Subfolders in your home directory are totally OK being deleted? You store your documents so that only root can modify them?

And do you know set -e has a ton of its own pitfalls and doesn't save you from this? It's a half-broken mitigation. I don't have energy to keep arguing here, but I would suggest go learning about the pitfalls of Bash and set -e and such.

No, if you're using a language that requires you to perform some obscure incantation like "set -euo" before running your scripts, you're asking for something wrong to happen.

Blame the disease, not the symptom.

if your pedantic enough to use "set -euo", you're going to add it to the script and not make a user set it first.

If people copy-and-paste complex shell scripts without testing, you’re going to have a bad day no matter what you do. The solution is to work on better practice, use of shellcheck, rewriting complex logic in Python, etc. since that’ll pay dividends in so many other ways.

> Until your users/colleagues source it into another shell

The intersection of people knowing the "source" command and not knowing what is a she-bang or the difference between sh and bash is quite small.

So what is your point here? I'm hallucinating when I see people do this?

Are you suggesting that leaving off the shebang line makes these types of mistakes less likely? That makes no sense.

If I copy Python 2 code into Python 3 it’s not gonna work right either. What’s your point?