as I comment in basically every one of these shell articles, while Unix shell does kinda suck, the main problem is that the bad examples far, far outnumber the

as I comment in basically every one of these shell articles, while Unix shell does kinda suck, the main problem is that the bad examples far, far outnumber the good ones, and so everybody programs in an overly complicated manner. SCRIPT_DIR="${0%/*}" works in practically all shells, as long as the script is actually invoked by path (if you do curl script | bash, you're SOL right off the bat). the same applies with "combination of grep, awk and cut". awk contains almost all the functionality of grep, sed, and cut, so any pipeline of awk plus one of the others is almost always unnecessarily complicated. it would be like complaining "in python, string handling is so hard. look, you have to do import re; for x in re.sub(...).match(5).split(' ')[3:-5]: lst.append(x)". of course if you make it overly complicated then it will be overly complicated. there are also too many footguns. spaces and newlines are trivial to handle in 95% of scripts, as long as you quote every expansion. as long as you never ever write cmd $file and always write cmd "$file", that solves virtually all whitespace problems. quotation marks in filenames are never interpreted in a special manner in Bourne-like shell unless you use eval, which has the same pitfalls as any other interpreted language (see python above).