No other method allows you to have a universal installer on every platform that will always work. No shell will guarantee that either. Last week I spent a f

No other method allows you to have a universal installer on every platform that will always work. No shell will guarantee that either. Last week I spent a few hours debugging an installer (bash script) that was failing with a rather puzzling error message (variable not defined). Non-Linux, bash 5.x. Worked on nearly everything under the sun including OSX with its ancient GPLv2 bash. Turns out on one non-Linux operating systems, one of the utilities used for string manipulation, while POSIX compliant, behaved differently than the same utility in nearly every other operating system. has fewer dependencies than other solutions Wrong, wrong, wrong. Nearly everything you do in a shell script is an external dependency. And that's the biggest problem with shell scripts. The actual language is so narrowly scoped that you're dependent upon external utilities that are not so easy to upgrade. Count how many programs are in /bin. Those are your dependencies. Unlike e.g. python or ruby dependencies, you'll have a much harder time upgrading /bin. Having to fork a new process for trivial tasks is also one of the reasons why shell scripts are so slow. Sure, bash has builtin versions of some of those utilities like [, but not every system has bash.