> The only downside of shell scripting is.... The only downside? Let's add that no major *NIX shell that I'm aware of has any good way to modularize code whil

> The only downside of shell scripting is.... The only downside? Let's add that no major *NIX shell that I'm aware of has any good way to modularize code while enforcing encapsulation of state. At my previous job, we had a rule that any shell script longer than about a page of code had to be replaced with a Python script ASAP. That was a good rule, IMO, because once you've exceeded a certain size, a shell script starts getting brittle and hard to work with. I don't know if 1 page of code is the threshold size or not, but it seems like as good a cutoff as any.