How do you handle packages? I want scripts to a be a single file with a shebang, not a repo with a requirements.txt that I need to run in a venv. To me, this is the biggest blocker to using Python for any non-trivial scripting (which is precisely the kind where I wouldn't want to use bash), but I'd like to know how others deal with it.

C# scripts let you reference packages in a comment at the top of the file, for example:

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/announcing-dotnet-run-...

You can specify requirements at the top of file and uv can run the script after automatically installing the dependencies.

https://avilpage.com/2025/04/learn-python-uv-in-100-seconds....

https://peps.python.org/pep-0723/, e.g.:

  # /// script
  # requires-python = ">=3.11"
  # dependencies = [
  #   "requests<3",
  #   "rich",
  # ]
  # ///
  
  import requests
  from rich.pretty import pprint
  
  resp = requests.get("https://peps.python.org/api/peps.json")
  data = resp.json()
  pprint([(k, v["title"]) for k, v in data.items()][:10])

Nix allows you to do this with any language and required dependency: https://wiki.nixos.org/wiki/Nix-shell_shebang

What can you do with bash that isn't in the stdlib of python?

Generally the only nontrivial scripting I ever do is associated with a larger project, so I often already have a pyproject.toml and a UV environment, and I just add the dependencies to the dev group.

I don't have much need of this personally, but I was playing around with an example from earlier in the thread and ended up with this:

    #!/usr/bin/env -S uv run --with sh --script
    from sh import ifconfig
    print(ifconfig("en0"))

Honestly, I just use a requirements.txt file. It's not as convenient as having a single file, it's true, but that is far outweighed by how much easier Python is to use than bash. So I'm giving up a 3/10 convenience but gaining a 10/10 convenience, which I think is worth it.

Isn't pipx addressing exactly that?

once the script is non-trivial, 'install' it using pipx, in editable mode when you work on the script and as normal pipx installed cli utility otherwise.

the venv part is then completely under the hood.

what can you do with bash that you cannot do with the python standard library and shelling out?

What is wrong with writing a short wrapper in bash to activate a conda env before running the script? Too unsexy?

Isn't the fact that bash doesn't have a wonderful ecosystem of reusable modules a much more enormous insurmountable problem than the fact that you have to install python modules? You're really missing the forest for the trees.

Not only does bash not have a module system like python, or a vast ecosystem of modules like python, but also that it's much too weak and brittle a language to implement most of those modules that Python has, and can't even call native code libraries directly.

Even with just its standard built in "batteries included" libraries and no extension modules or native code modules, Python is still much more powerful than bash and easier to code and maintain.

If you're complaining about having to install Python modules, you're usually already doing something that's impossible or incredibly difficult to do in bash anyway.

Even something as simple and essential as fetching files via http or parsing json. Bash has to call out to other programs to do that, but you have to install those programs too, and while Python can certainly call out to curl or wget or jq, it doesn't have to, since it has all that and more built in.

There really is no comparison, because bash loses along so many dimensions at once compared to Python.

> How do you handle packages?

The same way you handle them with bash?

Install them?

What are we talking about here?