You have dealt with bad written python programs, sure, but if you have to deal with a bad written shell script, it's much worse! The shell is full of strange a

You have dealt with bad written python programs, sure, but if you have to deal with a bad written shell script, it's much worse! The shell is full of strange and dangerous behaviors, that make even experienced programmers write buggy scripts. The main reason is that the shell wants to be a programming language but works differently from every other programming language, and has a special and complicated syntax. Also shell scripts are really not that portable at all, if you write a script on a GNU system it's nearly guaranteed that it will not work on a non-GNU system, and vice versa. Not only the shell but more importantly the commands are different, GNU awk is different than standard UNIX awk, GNU sed is different that UNIX sed, grep is different, and so on. Maybe minor difference that produces bug difficult to find and fix. For me if a shell script becomes more long than 50/100 lines of code you should consider rewriting it in python, shell scripts are only a valid solutions to rapidly write programs that invokes some commands to automate some things, not a valid solution for doing complex tasks.