And what a tool of last resort it is. It may be much easier (and most of the time I would generally prefer) to use Python for scripting purposes, but Bash is a

And what a tool of last resort it is. It may be much easier (and most of the time I would generally prefer) to use Python for scripting purposes, but Bash is a) almost always available and b) widely portable. If you manage any servers where you never know if Python is available or if it’s version 2 or 3 (and you have no power to change this for one reason or other), you know the value of this. No, it’s not ideal, but we live in a non-ideal world. Long live Bash.