[squibbles]

Apple has kind of herded me into zsh for work in the terminal. So far it has been pleasant, with interesting plugins, but it's periodic updates are a little annoying. Despite remaining in zsh while in a terminal, I still find myself writing only bash scripts when a script it needed.

[swirepe]

>Despite remaining in zsh while in a terminal, I still find myself writing only bash scripts when a script it needed.

I do this too. I think it's good practice; zsh is amazing as an interactive shell, but bash is everywhere.

[quesera]

Bash is not everywhere, but /bin/sh is..!

If portability is important, I'd recommend Bourne shell instead.

Sometimes there's a justification for writing shell scripts in bash. E.g. if you only care about Linux forever.

Frequently though, a simple script will unexpectedly grow, and start to require non-trivial data structures, etc. If there's no time for a rewrite in a more appropriate language (Python/Ruby/Perl), then moving to bash can be a compromise.

[swirepe]

>if you only care about Linux forever.

You caught me, and you're right: sh (not bash) is the portable option.