[syntonym2]

Python is by default installed on RHEL, CentOS, Debian and many more, the noteble exception are BSDs [0]. Python 2.4 was released in 2004, by writing python 2.4 compatible code you should cover everything besides ancient mainframes. While python 2.4. does not contain all niceties of modern python, it has lists, sets, dicts and the subprocess module which makes writing bash script comparable scripts very doable.

  [0] https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/24808/317276

[ric2b]

Why Python 2 instead of 3? There are several distributions that no longer ship it, and AFAIK it's no longer supported as of 2020.