I have a PHP script that does idempotentcy. It was strictly easier to write than a similar code in bash the moment one needs non-trivial and robust patching of

I have a PHP script that does idempotentcy. It was strictly easier to write than a similar code in bash the moment one needs non-trivial and robust patching of config files. And passing force flags can lead to subtle issues as -f and friends may have wrong behavior in corner cases. So for this reason I do not use it in shell scripts and rather do explicit tests before the command, like test -f file && rm file