Because Linux systems can vary widely. Even the same distro can have subtle - or even significant - differences from one hosting provider to another. So writing

Because Linux systems can vary widely. Even the same distro can have subtle - or even significant - differences from one hosting provider to another. So writing a shell script that was robust enough to "just work" would not only be complex, it would also likely suffer from readability issues (as so many complex shell scripts do) and thus many sysadmins might not want to run something that can't audit - which is quite sensible really. In fact you cannot even guarantee that Bash will be installed, that's just how annoyingly complicated this job can be. As a side note, it's also sometimes better having a tutorial full of manual steps as that helps educate the "sysadmin" regarding best practices and some of the basics of Linux administration (if they weren't already familiar). That experience can be just as valuable as hardening the server itself.