[arminiusreturns]

>Bash alone, it’s only as useful as the tools you use it with

This is like half the point for me. It's that I have lots of cli tools I like to use, and many of them are very unix-philosophy like. I want to cobble them together to accomplish a task, and since they already work with shell and pipes etc, it's trivial.

Now in an alternative, I have to go find some library that does the equivalent, or write my own version of the functions, etc, and lots of times those libraries have the thier own sets of pitfalls. I like bash because it encourages sticking the unix philsophy of do one thing and do it well (because you are just using it as a glue, not as a material itself). (also sometimes I just want something thats easy to read and understand)

For all those who bash bash as so horrible, unstable, non-prod.... bash scripts aren't perfect, and nobody who uses bash would say so, but bash runs on millions of prod systems across the world and things are fine... so maybe whats needed is a bit less holier-than-thou attitude from those people and bit more "you do you".

[cle]

The point is that you still have to make sure those tools are installed on the system, and compatible with the code you wrote. Standard CLI programs we rely on in our Bash scripts can vary dramatically between Linux distributions and OSs. If you want portable Bash code you need to bundle it in a container w/ all of its dependencies, or be very judicious about what programs and program features you use.

I'm not bashing Bash, I use Bash all the time and it's enormously useful. But it has limitations and tradeoffs that make me reach for other things more often.