If you need to coordinate activity between multiple systems in such a way that you are calling remote shells, then the shell is the place to run the show. I wr

If you need to coordinate activity between multiple systems in such a way that you are calling remote shells, then the shell is the place to run the show. I wrote an article on xargs parallel scripting some years ago that was popular here, and I can't imagine trying to do that in C. POSIX shells have great flaws. It is not LR-parsed language that can be implemented by a simple yacc grammar, and this leads to ambiguity. However, POSIX (as dash) is fast, portable, and small enough for embedded systems. Few of dash's peers are its equal if all of these are required.