Shell

Bash is a fundamental part of the Unix ecosystem, and it is widely used for scripting and automation tasks. It provides a powerful set of built-in utils, operators, process controllers. Bash gives an efficient way to fine-tune the behavior: cmd aliases, context presets, custom functions, env injections, and more.

zx is not trying to replace bash, but to enhance it with JavaScript's capabilities:

• Parallel execution
• Data transformations
• Exception handling
• Conditional logic and loops

#!/usr/bin/env zx
import { $ } from 'zx'

$.nothrow = true

const repos = ['zx', 'webpod']
const clones = repos
  .map(n => $`git clone https://github.com/google/${n} ${n}-clone`)

const results = await Promise.all(clones)
const errors = results.filter(o => !o.ok).map(o => o.stderr.trim())
console.log('errors', errors.join('\n'))

for (p of clones) {
  await p.pipe`cat > ${p.pid}.txt`
}

Bash and Pwsh

There're many shell implementations. zx brings a few setup helpers:

• useBash switches to bash
• usePowerShell — PowerShell
• usePwsh — pwsh (PowerShell v7+)

You can also set the shell directly via JS API, CLI flags or envars:

$.shell = '/bin/zsh'

zx --shell /bin/zsh script.js

ZX_SHELL=/bin/zsh zx script.js

zx = bash + js

No compromise, take the best of both.