Currenty, I’m using fish as my shell. Having used zsh for quite a while, there are some features I was missed from ZSH.

One is the ability to copy-and-paste any and all examples from the internet (watch, out that may be dangerous²). In Fish you can’t do that, as fish’s syntax isn’t always compatible with those.

For example fish doesn’t support the && and || operators, so instead of

./long_running_install_script && echo "Success!"

you have to do

./long_running_install_script; and echo "Success!"

This actually makes fish more aligned with the original Unix philosopy “do one thing, and do it well”, as the system already provides a way to do the thing you need, the shell shouldn’t become an all-encompassing system of itself.

Another thing is the syntax for command substitution. Here we use the which command to look up the path for the python binary, and then use ls -l to see what it links to (if its a symbolic link):

ls -l `which python`   # old syntax (still works)
ls -l $(which python)  # modern syntax

# in both cases, what gets "executed" by the shell
ls -l '/usr/local/bin/python'
# i.e. `which python` is replaced by it's output /usr/local/bin/python

in fish that looks like

ls -l (which python)

The fish syntax is simpler, and supports nesting like the modern syntax in bash and zsh, but in this particular case, there doesn’t seems to be much reason to break “backwards compatibility”. But then again, having already broken compatibility elsewhere – why not change to a lighter syntax here?

Process substitution

That leads me to the real subject of today’s post. One really cool thing about ZSH is Process Substitution⁴. Process substitution lets you take the output of a command and use it in place of a file, instead of outputting it directly into the command you’re trying to execute which is what command substitution does.

Let’s say you have two files with a bunch of names, and you want to see what names appear in one list, but not in the other. diff seems like the perfect tool, but that’s only going to work if the two list are sorted first. With process substitution we can do that on-the-fly:

diff =(sort soccer_team.txt) =(sort party_invites.txt)
# what gets "executed" by the shell
diff /tmp/tempfileA /tmp/tempfileB

Here zsh writes the output of the sort commands to two temporary files, which are then passed to diff. zsh keeps track of the temporary files and deletes them when they have been used.

In my case I needed to install all packages from requirements.txt except one – numpy. The obvious thing to do here is cat requirements.txt | grep -v numpy, which prints all lines except ones containing numpy. However, pip doesn’t support any piping from STDIN.

In ZSH I would do a process substitution

pip install -r =(cat requirements.txt | grep -v numpy)

today I found out you can do something similar in fish, using the command psub⁶:

pip install -r (cat requirements.txt | grep -v numpy | psub)

Once again, fish adheres to the UNIX philosophy, and chooses not to bloat with extra syntax, what can be done with a command :)

(To be clear: psub is fish specific, and actually part of the syntax, due to the way it has to cleanup after file-closing it would probably not be able to be implemented as a separate command outside of fish)

Notes The && and || operators were added to fish in version fish 3.0b1 (released December 11, 2018) for pragmatic reasons.

References

⁴ ZSH process substitution: https://zsh.sourceforge.net/Intro/intro_7.html ⁵ fish process substitution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9017996 Fish reverse process substitution: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/1786