> since bash is not up to the task What do you mean by this? You can write safe shell scripts; it just takes discipline and learning how to correctly write the

> since bash is not up to the task What do you mean by this? You can write safe shell scripts; it just takes discipline and learning how to correctly write them. There are a lot of pitfalls but it isn't that hard if people actually learned the language. Edit: to clarify discipline meaning always doing things correctly and never taking shortcuts. For example, you must use: while IFS= read -r || [[ "${REPLY}" ]]; do ((X++)); done < <(command) If you want to loop over lines in a file. Don't use for loops, don't pipe to while, etc. It may be verbose but it won't be buggy