It's not quite free, in my experience, but yes, it is more cross-platform than bash. The price you still have to pay for cross-platform is the different paths,

It's not quite free, in my experience, but yes, it is more cross-platform than bash. The price you still have to pay for cross-platform is the different paths, different output formats for system commands, etc. This is particularly pronounced for the stuff most of my lines of shell scripts are used for, where it's interacting almost entirely with system utilities to figure out where it's running and to do things to make sure the system is able to run the software my scripts are installing (which also interacts with the system in intimate and intrusive ways). But, you'd pay this with just about any programming language. Then again, I also use shell scripts for building/deploying things where a makefile would be overkill (and of course makefiles interact with the shell, too, so building your makefiles for POSIX shell rather than bash is also a good practice), and I make those with POSIX, as well. And, in those cases, it would definitely be OK on damned near any platform. I even worked on Windows for a few months when I got my current laptop because HiDPI support and the graphics drives on Linux just weren't working well enough, and most of my stuff worked fine there...both in the WSL and from a git bash prompt.