Executing Shell Scripts in the Wrong Order, Correctly
Georgios Liargkovas, Κωνσταντίνος Καλλάς, Michael Greenberg, Nikos Vasilakis · 2023
Shell scripts are critical infrastructure for developers, administrators, and scientists; and ought to enjoy the performance benefits of the full suite of advances in compiler optimizations. But between the shell's inherent challenges and neglect from the community, shell tooling and performance lags far behind the state of the art. We propose executing scripts out-of-order to better use modern computational resources. Optimizing any part of an arbitrary shell script is very challenging: the shell language's complex, late-bound semantics makes extensive use of opaque external commands with arbitrary side effects.