> That second example is write-only code, Tacking on the `-d ''` flag to `read` makes it write-only!? > In bash, that's a 50-line monstrosity. In Ruby (or Pyt

> That second example is write-only code, Tacking on the `-d ''` flag to `read` makes it write-only!? > In bash, that's a 50-line monstrosity. In Ruby (or Python, or even Perl), it's ~5 clean, readable lines. As an example, let's take the input, batch it in to groups of 5, filter-out files that don't contain "token1" or "token2", and pass those as a NUL-separated list to stdin of another binary. I wrote that up. It came out to 10 lines in either Ruby or Bash. https://pastebin.com/EksRxmVJ https://pastebin.com/EksRxmVJ It's certainly not a "50-line monstrosity" > Again, in another language, that's just a repeated application of a shellescape function as you're composing things. In bash... I have no idea. In Bash, "shellescape" is pronounced "printf %q" (and shelljoin is pronounced "printf '%q '"). In Bash, that's similarly just repeated application of printf %q: base_cmd=('whatever' 'arg with space') nested_cmd=(sh -c "$(printf '%q ' "${base_cmd[@]}")") ssh user@hostname "$(printf '%q ' "${nested_cmd[@]}")" For direct comparison with Ruby: escaped=$(printf '%q ' "${base_cmd[@]}") escaped=base_cmd.map{|a|shellescape(a)}.join(" ") escaped=shelljoin(base_cmd) Or, Bash 4.4 gained @Q as a shorthand for that: base_cmd=('whatever' 'arg with space') nested_cmd=(sh -c "${base_cmd[*]@Q}") ssh user@hostname "${nested_cmd[*]@Q}" > In most scripting languages, you've got functions like Pathname#relative_path_from(dir) and Pathname#clean_path. You mean $(realpath --relative-to=DIR) and $(realpath)? > Or how about a "recursively collapse empty or pseudo-empty directory" function? ... it's ~10 lines of Ruby. Try to implement it in Bash!... And it's 6 lines of Bash? find \( -not -type d \ -not -name .DS_Store \ -not -name Thumbs.db \ -not -name Desktop.ini \ -not -name '._*' \ \) -printf '%h\0%p\0' | sort -uz Or were you looking for a listing of pseudo-empty directories? comm -z23 <(find -type d -print0 | sort -z) \ <(find \( -not -type d \ -not -name .DS_Store \ -not -name Thumbs.db \ -not -name Desktop.ini \ -not -name '._*' \ \) -printf '%h\0%p\0' | sort -uz) Like I said, there are things that are hard to do in Bash, but I'm not certain you've pointed any of them out. > There is a reason that the default kind of cloud-init script is a YAML file, rather than a Bash script. And there's also a reason why a "GNU/Linux distro" is essentially a giant pile of shell scripts (maybe embedded in to Makefiles). > a reason why every /bin/init that isn't sysvinit has soundly beaten sysvinit. I mean, I'm happy with systemd on my systems, but: OpenRC is a giant pile of shell scripts. > the parts where you do file manipulation are abstracted out, ... through domain-specific file-manipulation binaries (dpkg) Great example, because the core of Debian is the "rules" file for each package, which is... a Makefile, containing shell. Or, look at Arch Linux, the core of which is the "PKGBUILD" file for each package, which is... a Bash script. > or through pre-written and thoroughly-checked file-manipulation Bash scripts (autotools). Autoconf is targeting shells that aren't Bash. It's pre-written and thoroughly-checked shell that contains wonky workarounds, in order to be compatible with buggy shells from 25 years ago. If you're assuming "modern shell / utilities", file manipulation in Bash isn't hard.