First, we shouldn't be insulting people for having different opinions on the nuances of command line tools. Secondly, I agree with you that "useless use of x"

First, we shouldn't be insulting people for having different opinions on the nuances of command line tools. Secondly, I agree with you that "useless use of x" should not be viewed as dogma and people shouldn't stress too much about it. Instead, these can be viewed as optimizations, or just details regarding how unix shells and tools work that can help inform your coding. IMO, the best thing to do when writing shell scripts, regardless of skill level, is configure ShellCheck in your text editor's linter, and then do everything it tells you to do: https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck/ https://github.com/koalaman/shellcheck/