[RossM]

Thank you for sharing this; I infrequently have to write standalone shell scripts but every time I do I spend a while looking around for best practices and often just end up with some contradicting opinions.

[m0nty]

There's also this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6866085

And the Google 'Shell Style Guide': https://google.github.io/styleguide/shell.xml

Just in case you hadn't seen them already.

[moviuro]

Just for the record, the Google guide focuses on Google infrastructure and systems, not portability. Using /bin/bash for instance is not a good idea if you want to port your work to BSD systems.

[richardwhiuk]

Which you probably don't care about.

[stephenr]

Bash isn't even a good choice if you want to support just macOS and Linux, because the versions available are so wildly different.

[jsjohnst]

1) supporting both macOS and Linux in bash is trivial. Just stick to Bash 3 functionality.

2) Bash4 is trivial to install on macOS via home brew, so saying “available” is a misnomer. “Default” would be a bit better, but many Linux distros still in use don’t use Bash4.

3) Bash 3 vs 4 isn’t “wildly” different.

[moviuro]

I usually refer to http://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashFAQ , which is what anyone on #bash IRC channel would recommend.

Good luck!