Bash and most alternatives are full of footguns. However, they are really convenient to glue together different components, e.g. a data preprocessing system. P

Bash and most alternatives are full of footguns. However, they are really convenient to glue together different components, e.g. a data preprocessing system. Personally, the way I avoid footguns is to use a functional style. Filter instead of conditions and map instead of loops. GNU Parallel makes this straightforward, including distributed commands across machines! Aside, it is easy to emulate relational algebra with grep, sed, and awk. A good essay describing some of the advantages of this approach is: http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-progra...