Beyond the basics, the shell features with the biggest ROI beyond the basics are to quote properly and use namerefs and arrays (esp. to return values from funct

Beyond the basics, the shell features with the biggest ROI beyond the basics are to quote properly and use namerefs and arrays (esp. to return values from functions), e.g., # find2ra arrayName {find arguments...} # Run find command and put results in array arrayName. find2ra() { # (error checking removed) local -r f2raVar="${1}" shift # map find entries to ra, using char=0 as delimiter mapfile -d $'\0' -t "$f2raVar" < <(find -dsx "${@}" -print0) # -print0: handle paths with spaces, etc. # -ds: For consistency, use depth-first, lexigraphic order # -x: Avoid traversing other devices } # sample usage ra=() find2ra ra . -type f -name \*.sh for shFile in "${ra[@]}"; do ... ; done There are many resources for shell scripts already. A good starting-point might be to list the awesome shell-script sample sites already available. The effort to document shell is also somewhat Pyrrhic. The benefit would be... more shell? A more modern shell? Another goal might be to switch to a real language sooner. Go and Python are the obvious choices, but Swift and Java also support shebang's: #!/usr/bin/env swift #!/usr/bin/env java --source 17 Dependencies are always tricky. swift-sh allows you to declare dependencies as comments after the import: import PromiseKit // @mxcl ~> 6.5 https://github.com/mxcl/swift-sh https://github.com/mxcl/swift-sh