First, I'd like to say that my intention in this posting was just to give a rough analogy that would make monads a bit less scary for the non-haskellers. I shou

First, I'd like to say that my intention in this posting was just to give a rough analogy that would make monads a bit less scary for the non-haskellers. I should have stated that more clearly though. Hoever, I stand corrected. Bash executes the commands in a very different way from the IO monad. Using pure functions like String -> String you'd get the similar effect in Haskell, just like you suggested. That that would of course disable all side-effects from the "links in the chain". Which is in many cases desired, but that's not Bash though. I guess I'd need to define a whole new Monad to emulate the way Bash operates. I'm not saying you should emulate it though.