I agree with you. I think we are just speaking about different things. I was more thinking about the things that happen in a configure script, for example. Not

I agree with you. I think we are just speaking about different things. I was more thinking about the things that happen in a configure script, for example. Not a "hoot loop" like a big grep over millions of lines or something. There are situations in shell code where the difference between a case-match or string-suffix-replace written in shell and a process spawn matters. Not only because forking a process for one simple string operation is wasteful (cost: about 1ms), but also because of the semantic problems that come with child processes (error handling).