[colonial]

This is a decent heuristic, although (IMO) you can usually get away with ~100 lines of shell without too much headache.

Last year I wrote (really, grew like a tumor) a 2000 line Fish script to do some Podman magic. The first few hundred lines were great, since it was "just" piping data around - shell is great at that!

It then proceeded to go completely off the rails when I went full sunk cost fallacy and started abusing /dev/shm to emulate hash tables.

E: just looked at the source code. My "build system" was another Fish script that concatenated several script files together. Jeez. Never again.