>I don’t really care about targeting, say, IRIX, or z/OS, or the early-2000s-era Windows POSIX Subsystem. Sure, those are very niche, but not all BSDs or every

>I don’t really care about targeting, say, IRIX, or z/OS, or the early-2000s-era Windows POSIX Subsystem. Sure, those are very niche, but not all BSDs or every Linux distros have bash in the base distribution. And if you work with embedded system bash is very much a luxury. You mention busybox but this one is very much a crap shot because everything in busybox is opt-in. You want to use `seq`? Better make sure that it's configured. On the other hand you almost certainly won't have bash on these systems either. At any rate if the alternative is between having to install python, ruby, perl or lua on my machine or having to maintain and hack on ginormous bash scripts I know what I'll chose. But in general I like your approach, it's pragmatic. It's just pretty hard these days to find a system that ships bash but can't give you some decent scripting support, at least in my experience.