[endur]

Bash scripts are great if they're yours. My current project has ~20 large bash scripts that do all sorts of different things. They were all written by people who haven't worked on the project for two years. Anyone who needs to make changes there spends far too long trying to figure out what's going on. The scripts could have been written in the same language as the project, and it wouldn't take a whole day to make changes to them.

I think they wrote in Bash to avoid the interpreter startup time. But the scripts are run very infrequently and most of them start/stop long-running services.

That being said, getting a bash script to do the right thing is very satisfying!

[warfangle]

Bash scripts for very simple series of commands; higher level scripts for when those sets of commands need logic wrapped 'round 'em. For example: provisioning for packer|vagrant, if you don't need to go overkill with puppet|chef.