If you've ever seriously written shell scripts you'll know that they're not 100% portable. You always have to go through hoops to make them work properly across

If you've ever seriously written shell scripts you'll know that they're not 100% portable. You always have to go through hoops to make them work properly across operating systems systems. BSD and OS X come with the BSD userland tools, with the exception of bash being default on OS X. Linux comes with the GNU userland. A few differences from the top of my head: - BSD utilities do not accept any -options after filenames, GNU utilities do. - The situation is reversed for BSD find. It insists on accepting a directory name as the first parameter. - BSD sed doesn't support the -i option in the same way as GNU sed does. - Even different versions of GNU utilities are not necessarily compatible. A few years ago I ran into compatibility problems with 'head', 'tail' and even 'free' across different Linux distros. I can't remember the exact issues though. So I agree with the grandparent, Node and Python are a lot more portable than shell scripts.