Should Quarto prefer the knitr rendering engine if the doc contains bash scripts?

[Robinlovelace]

If you start a .qmd with a {bash} chunk, it seems to default to using the Jupyter rendering engine. That is unhelpful because there is not output from that engine. To force knitr, I make the first chunk a hidden R command (could not recall how to enforce rendering engine). Suggestion: if knitr is available and the .qmd chunk contains bash scripts, knitr should be preferred.

Asking as a question because not 100% sure this is a bug.

[eitsupi]

could not recall how to enforce rendering engine

See https://quarto.org/docs/computations/execution-options.html#engine-binding

I would always recommend including the engine to make it do what it is intended to do.
(If we have a Linter for qmd files, it would make sense to force the engine in the default settings.)

Suggestion: if knitr is available and the .qmd chunk contains bash scripts, knitr should be preferred.

I have not tried it, but I don't think it is generally true because of the existence of the bash kernel.
https://github.com/takluyver/bash_kernel

[Robinlovelace]

Aha so I'd need to install the bash_kernel Python package to get bash outputs? Thanks for the detailed reply and links in any case, v. useful.