[lvillani]

shellcheck (https://www.shellcheck.net) is an absolute godsend when writing Bash/POSIX sh scripts.

It catches so many errors that I think it's a must have in every programmer's toolbox. It even catches bash-isms when you are targeting POSIX sh. It saved me many many hours of grief trying to debug shell scripts I wrote and changed the way I write them for the better.

[aequitas]

This is also my number one thing I wish I'd known about Bash. It saves on so many trivial bugs.

The documentation is especially great, for ever problem it detects you get an unique reference which you can lookup on the wiki eg: https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck/wiki/SC2086 It then not only describes the problem but also shows different ways of solving it with some great examples and reasoning. I think I learned more Bash from Shellcheck than anywhere else.

[james-mcelwain]

shellcheck is amazing. I write enough shell scripts that I remember most of the syntax and tricks, but am far from an expert. shellcheck has taught me so many things and makes me feel more safe writing scripts in the event I forget one of the million gotchas.

[gkya]

Targeting POSIX as much as possible is really important if you don't want to force Bash on people, especially with open-source public code. Many OSes don't have Bash in the default install, but many just assume that bash is available on all the target systems.

[Aloha]

like which?

I'm hard pressed to think of a modern unix that doesn't include bash by default. Solaris maybe?

[gkya]

All the current BSD systems, and some GNU/Linux distributions. I'd guess that illumos does not have bash installed by default, too.

[nisa]

everything embedded - OpenWRT/LEDE uses busybox with ash - Android uses mksh? that only supports a subset of bash features. Every Debian/Ubuntu has ash as /bin/sh that only supports POSIX.

[Aloha]

I'd argue that writing scripts for an embedded target for a regular server/workstation target are fundamentally different problems - almost anything I'd write for those platforms would be targeted for them - not for general purpose unix.

Portability is only desirable, if you need portability - otherwise it frequently adds complexity for little return benefit.