[xelxebar]

Other people mention constrained environments, but tight loops are also a thing. If you know bash's parameter expansion well, it can make it really easy to write a one-liners that speedily process large amounts of output. Setting up and tearing down a whole process (e.g. sed) can cause an order of magnitude slow down, which is significant if you just want something quick and dirty.

[munk-a]

I feel like... maybe? But quick or dirty should be enough - you could also build a python interpreter once to map over the data and then maybe write up some tests to confirm the functionality.

Every explanation of why to use bash here seems like it's got a whole lot of constraints on when it's a good to use - I've finished some tasks just in bash scripts but when I'm writing something for anything other than one time passes it seems like more of a maintenance liability than anything else.

[xelxebar]

Meh. Choose your poison. As the trope goes, "No language is good at everything." Python is verbose compared to bash for many tasks, and the reverse is true as well.

IMHO, spending the time to actually learn some bash can really improve one's CLI life. Bashing on bash seems mostly like a tired ol' trope, "If it's in bash, it's bad."

The author of the original article really has written some pretty shell code!