Oils aims to be the absolute best way to migrate shell scripts! (I created the project, and the wiki page being discussed)

https://www.oilshell.org/

OSH is the most bash-compatible shell in the world, and YSH is a new language

    ls | sort | uniq | wc -l   # this is both OSH and YSH

    var mydict = {foo: 42, bar: ['a', 'b']}   # this is new YSH stuff you can start using
    json write (mydict)

The difference between OSH and YSH is exactly a set of "shopt" options [1], although YSH feels like a brand new language too! There is a smooth blend.

I think it's worth it for 2 things alone

- YSH checks all errors - you never lose an exit code

- YSH has real arrays and doesn't mangle your variables with word splitting

There's a lot more: modules with namespaces (use mymodule.ysh), buffered I/O that's not slow, etc.

Gradually upgrading -https://github.com/oils-for-unix/oils/wiki/Gradually-Upgradi... (people are writing new YSH, but not many people have gradually upgraded, so I'd definitely appreciate feedback from people with a big "shell script problem")

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There is a FAQ here about Perl:

Are you reinventing Perl? - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2021/01/why-a-new-shell.html#a...

Not to say that migrating to Perl is worse in any way, i.e. if you already know Perl or your team knows it.

But objectively YSH is also a shell, so I think more of the code carries over, and there is a more direct upgrade path.

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[1] Unix Shell Should Evolve like Perl 5 - https://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/07/blog-roadmap.html#the-... - i.e. with compatible upgrade options

That looks great! I moved from Fish and NuShell to Zsh because of its reasonable compatibility with bash, so OSH seems right up my alley.

Or Ruby, which is essentially Smalltalk for Unix, plus lots of Perl-isms.

Haskell (e.g. shh) and Clojure (Babashka) are also a nice for this usecase, but more niche options.