Hm interesting, yup that is exactly the kind of program that might get "too big" for bash, and running it under Oil is a good idea. You can then incrementally

Hm interesting, yup that is exactly the kind of program that might get "too big" for bash, and running it under Oil is a good idea. You can then incrementally upgrade to Oil -- no big bang rewrite required! Other huge shell programs here: https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell-Programs-in-the-World https://github.com/oilshell/oil/wiki/The-Biggest-Shell-Progr... And yes Oil should be suitable for writing command line tools (although it needs a modern flag parser, not the ancient getopt builtin that shell has.) Often the right thing to do is to write a tiny bit of C to interface with the kernel, and then call that from shell. That is very useful for Linus container syscalls, and I can also see it being useful for low level networking. I would love to see a project in that direction :) I'm writing some posts now about project plans! Thanks for the support.