I would never suggest to anyone that they use bash when there is a better alternative, but it often happens that you start with a "toy" script and then it ends

I would never suggest to anyone that they use bash when there is a better alternative, but it often happens that you start with a "toy" script and then it ends up growing and growing. Even in my job (I'm a consultant) I run into massive bash scripts that do complex jobs. Not everyone is going to rewrite, and if they're not they should have tools available to them to help make their scripts more robust. The @macro alias is just a helpful tool for achieving that without quadrupling the size of your script. Thanks for the feedback.