[peterwwillis]

Dash is Bourne-compatible! And Bash is not installed everywhere. I can think of at least five systems i've used in the past five years that either didn't have Bash, or Bash was not the default shell, and even the path to Bash isn't the same on all systems (since it is technically an add-on). Anyway, I did not say use Bourne for more complexity, I said for more compatibility.

People are opposed to learning yet another tool. But here's the really funny thing about the "use a more robust language" argument: not only do they introduce more dependencies, they can introduce more bugs (due to increased complexity), and are almost always a maintenance headache. The one thing that's easy to maintain after 10 years is a shell script. Perl is a nightmare to maintain after 10 years (mostly due to the lack of good Perl programmers) and awk is just barely better.

[carlisle_]

Right I was thinking about that after I replied to your comment, that I let my point get away from me. I read so many other comments putting down bash I was pleading my case to them, not you, haha.

I did not realize dash was bourne compatible. Also, I'm curious what systems you've used didn't have bash installed by default, as I haven't used anything in a long long time that didn't have bash.

[peterwwillis]

Solaris, BSD, HPUX, hell even stripped-down Linux installs (though sometimes it exists and is just in a weird path). Occasionally I need to bootstrap an OS installer and they never have Bash.

By default I write Bourne, and if I need the extra complexity/speed/etc i'll switch to Bash, but it's pretty rare that I need to use Bashisms.