[kazinator]

Useful in small embedded. Add twelve lines to a boot script, or bring in several new executables into /bin?

There are resource constraints even in large-ish embedded. Your main file system may live in a decent amount of flash space, but when the kernel is booting, it uses a tiny file system in RAM, which is pulled out of an initramfs image. There is a shell there with scripts.

The partition for storing the kernel image (with initramfs, device tree blobs and whatever else) might be pretty tight.

However, because a lot of these snippets depend on Bash extensions, they preclude the use of a smaller, lighter shell.

[Too]

Wouldn't a compiled binary be smaller and faster than an interpreted language? Assuming stdlib is already loaded.