It's like the wisdom about functions longer than a page or a screen: If it's more than a screenful of actual logic, breaking it up will help you continue to und

It's like the wisdom about functions longer than a page or a screen: If it's more than a screenful of actual logic, breaking it up will help you continue to understand it. If it's a long function which is essentially a switching yard, like the central dispatcher in a bytecode interpreter, breaking it up won't make it any easier to understand, because it's pretty simple as it is. Bash is good for switching yard code, where you're gluing a lot of program invocations together with a few variables and a little bit of logic. It can certainly do other things, but that kind of code is the least risky when it becomes big.