[acdha]

This has only been true for the smallest shell scripts in my experience: bash will be less code at first but once you to be portable, handle errors, locking, unicode, buffer or process output, perform non-trivial redirections, or need any data structure more complicated than a simple string it's been pretty common to replace hundreds of lines of spaghetti bash with less Python even after you add comments and a proper CLI interface.

I've never had subprocess deadlock — was this on Windows?

[patrick451]

> I've never had subprocess deadlock — was this on Windows?

I've seen this happen seemingly randomly in linux trying to pipe the stdout of one subprocess into the stdin of another.

[acdha]

Interesting, I've never had that happen in heavy usage. I've had cases where the called processes blocked for some reason but that was solved by adding a timeout.