I am intrigued by the Nix language, because it is functional and because file paths are first class data types.

1. Is Nix language suitable for simple shell scripting, such as calling typical command-line utils and copying/moving files?

2. If yes, is there a way to install only the Nix language on MacOS? What I mean by this is, I don’t want to install Nix’s Multi-User Mode because it sounds like a hassle and intrusive to my computer (AFAIK it requires partitioning my SSD and creating several privileged user accounts).

I appears that in the past, there was a Nix Single-User Mode for MacOS. Has anyone found a way to make that previous install method work on MacOS 13.x?

I’m just working on personal development projects.

>Solution :

Is Nix language suitable for simple shell scripting, such as calling
typical command-line utils and copying/moving files?

It’s not really a general purpose language. And even writing ‘scripts’ in Nix, you would use a regular scripting language like bash. The Nix language is mostly focused on interacting with a nix store.

Nix always get executed in an indepedent/sandboxed enviornment, similar to the docker build environment. As such it won’t have access to your usual filesystem. And that is kind of the entire point of Nix.

However I think that is an implementation detail and technically I don’t think there is anything limiting Nix from running in the context of your native environment. This would have to be developed, which is not a small job.

---

However saying that you might still find nix useful for writing a shell script. You could write a nix expression that builds a nix package.

For example (just roughly, haven’t checked this):

example = (import (builtins.fetchGit {
  url = "ssh://root@example.co.uk:/root/gitrepo/example";
  rev = "abcxyz"
}) {});


pkgs.writeScript "example.sh"
        ''
            #!${pkgs.stdenv.shell}
            set -e

            echo "hi"
            cat ${example}/docs/example