Bash is amazing at being expressive and allowing for a ton of common things sysadmins / Devops / power users need to do with just one or a few lines of code vs

Bash is amazing at being expressive and allowing for a ton of common things sysadmins / Devops / power users need to do with just one or a few lines of code vs a “proper” language that might require libraries, compiling stuff, or just a ton more SLOC + time debugging. If you don’t know what a glob is going to match, try it first. Understand the semantics. If you need portability, do that too, but a ton of what I end up using bash for is along the lines of slicing up poorly formatted inconsistent lists and running tools against stuff, possibly in conjunction with args from those lists, and for that it’s amazing. Stuff like jq helps a lot, and tools like xmlstarlet before that were great too. I remember trying to rewrite a script that was getting long and AWKward in Python and getting pretty frustrated with how explicit and error-prone it was there. Sure, the result was probably more robust, but it came at the expense of an order of magnitude more dev / debugging time. That’s not always necessary; sometimes “good enough” is good enough, and usually bash is good enough.