Years ago I spent a lot of time (arguably too much time) writing (ba)sh scripts and this document was a great resource! But my main lesson from that period was

Years ago I spent a lot of time (arguably too much time) writing (ba)sh scripts and this document was a great resource! But my main lesson from that period was that bash pitfalls are readability/maintenance nightmares, confounded by the fact that most people don't know about most of the pitfalls. To make matters worse, you can't know which pitfalls are or aren't known to the original author / future maintainer of the script in front of you. But I'm not sure to what extent the language warts are inevitable consequences of what makes it so expressive and powerful. For example: unix pipes are amazing and the bash syntax for them is quite expressive. I can reproduce the same behavior in any of the more "sane" languages but I find that the equivalent code is a less readable procedural soup of string munging, control flow, and error control.