[JdeBP]

> Bash with it's multitude of annoying quoting and field splitting rules

So don't use the Bourne Again shell. After all and to start with, if you live in the Debian or Ubuntu worlds, your van Smoorenburg rc scripts have not been using the Bourne Again shell for about a decade.

There's no reason at all that run programs need be written in any shell script at all, let alone in the Bourne Shell script. Laurent Bercot publishes a tool named execline that takes the ideas of the old Thompson shell ("if" being an external command and so forth) to their logical conclusions, which is far better suited to what's being discussed here. One can also write run programs in Perl or Python, or write them as nosh scripts.

* http://blog.infinitenegativeutility.com/2015/2/celebrating-d...