The sibling comment by @glic3rinu pretty much says it, but I'll elaborate a little bit. Can't make any claims about being anything deep, but in a sense, my shif

The sibling comment by @glic3rinu pretty much says it, but I'll elaborate a little bit. Can't make any claims about being anything deep, but in a sense, my shift in perspective came from treating program state as "data in pipes" and doing that as extensively as possible. A big part of this was figuring out I could the `read` builtin to parse stuff into local variables: if read -r foo bar baz _; do # do stuff with $foo, $bar, $baz # $_ contains anything extra on the line done Also, once everything is on stdin, all the standard unix tools Just Work without having to echo and print everywhere, e.g. something like echo $some_local variable | unix_tool For me, this turned a lot ugly scripts into primarily a collection of functions that compose nicely via pipelines. Anyway, using `read` works especially nicely with tabular data too. For example, a naive CSV parser might look like while IFS=',' read -r field1 field2 field3 _; do # do stuff done