[bpchaps]

I use bash pretty regularly in the devops/sysadmin world pretty often. It can do some wonders, but it has some /serious/ issues.

That said, the reason it beats Python and all is simply because it's almost guaranteed to be on any *nix server you'll log into. Solaris, BSD, some networking equipment - it'll be there. Python? Maybe. Python 2.7? Sorry, your sysadmin didn't add that yum repo and we're stuck on 2.6 at best.

You'll have similar problems if some packages aren't installed on a machine, but as long as your scripts are using the usual gnu packages, you should be good (with some exceptions of course).

It's a crappy problem to have, but it's probably not going to go away, especially in prod environments. It's just easier to run bash than to get your sysadmins to do some damn patching (or management to approve it..) than to try/potentially fail with anything else.

Then again, I'm all for using /bin/sh for everything. :)