> then the feature will actually exist in a way that the average shell coder cares about I think it's worth picking at this a bit. At least IME, a fairly small

> then the feature will actually exist in a way that the average shell coder cares about I think it's worth picking at this a bit. At least IME, a fairly small fraction of the Shell I write needs to run literally (any|every)where. I don't mean to suggest there aren't people/projects for whom the opposite is true--just that it's worth chunking those cases and thinking about them differently. It obviously isn't a global solution, but in the Nix ecosystem we have decent idioms for asserting control over the shell and tools any given script runs with. Reliable environment provisioning can spare hundreds of lines of code real-world Shell tends to accumulate to sanity-check the runtime environment and adapt to the presence/absence of various utilities. It also enables us to use newer shells/features (and shell libraries) with confidence. It's enough leverage that I only give it up when I must.