You're right about the disadvantages of subshells, but wrong about this: > avoid bashisms What's holier-than-thou is insisting that people stick to a dialect

You're right about the disadvantages of subshells, but wrong about this: > avoid bashisms What's holier-than-thou is insisting that people stick to a dialect of shell scripting that hasn't changed in decades because some people think that conforming to POSIX is its own reward even if it makes life harder and programs worse. No, thanks. I'll stick to bashisms. Things like coprocesses and filemap make certain classes of program much easier to write. And yes, shell scripts are programs, and the quickest way to turn these programs into unmaintainable balls of mud is to follow your advice to avoid normal programming best practices simply because the program you're writing happens to be a shell script.