[out-of-ideas]

as such doing that yields different results based on am i on a mac, in debian, in a container, am i on a zebra-on-the-moon...

its all a bunch of loops and string manipulation in the end. in fact, awk can handle a whole lot of it too! and octave... and others, lol; so long as it does not turn into the python2 to python3 fun we've had in the past and we have some stability between versions; this is why i still choose bash (and the whole gnu binaries)

edit (formatting i hope, and python)

[arcanemachiner]

I'll admit that I haven't tried this on other platforms, but I was under the impression that the opposite should happen: `/bin/sh` loads a basic POSIX-compliant shell that should work on other platforms, with Bash, Zsh, and whatever else, which are extensions of a POSIX-compliant shell.

Blegh, now I have to do some digging...

[out-of-ideas]

sh will load whatever the OS decides it to open LOL; there is no rule. again why i just go with gnu bash as it is pretty feature rich and exec's other-cli-apps really well. the loops it can do, and arrays are just a bonus; if i need some more complex data structure, then there's another app for the job- that is not an interactive shell. just beware of the dragons when dealing with macos's old-ass bash; check out the version, go with new if you can