It's a process that's all too familiar to me - a script starts as a few lines of bash and very quickly turns into a few hundred lines of bash before being repla

It's a process that's all too familiar to me - a script starts as a few lines of bash and very quickly turns into a few hundred lines of bash before being replaced by a few lines of Python. For some reason in my head I think "this is so simple, Python would be overkill" when in fact it takes more effort (for me) to do anything non-trivial in bash. The real benefit of bash for me is that it makes it easy to invoke and bind together the many excellent tools we all know and love such as grep, sed, awk, curl, wget and so on. Chances are those tools can do their thing better than my hacked-together Python scripts can, so as long as I leave the heavy lifting to them and use bash only to shuffle text between them, a bash script can work well. It's true bash has a lot of gotchas, but it's just a matter of knowing them. As an alternative to `set -e` I tend to use `somecmd && echo "Success" || echo "Fail"`, and I usually explicitly check whether a variable is non-empty, as an alternative to `set -u`. Interested to hear whether these approaches have any major drawbacks as against `set -eu`.