Bash vs Python (dependency hell)
For a number of years I maintained a small collection of open source security scripts, written in Bash. The main purpose of these scripts was to act as a wrapper around other open source tools. Why try to remember long and awkward command line parameters, when you can ask a script to do that for you ?
Bash was chosen, as it was distribution-independent. It works almost everywhere (although sometimes OSX support is troublesome, due to outdated Bash versions).
After more and more (requested) features crept in, the
analyze_hosts.shBash script became more and more complex. That's why I decided to port the script to Python. In my experience, it's at-least-as portable, and the usage of third party (pip) packages means that less time is spent on re-inventing the weel, and more on the actual functionality.
Yes, sometimes people talk about the dependency hell of Python, and in
some cases, the usage of third party packages means you have to be
careful of what you're doing.
However, when using virtual environments each Python script and its
dependencies can be safely separated from the 'main' Python. For
example, the following commands create a separate virtual environment
for the security scripts repo …