Fair enough; Unix certainly gives you enough ways to shoot yourself and your customers in the foot. I probably should've added the qualifier "wrt. succinctness"

Fair enough; Unix certainly gives you enough ways to shoot yourself and your customers in the foot. I probably should've added the qualifier "wrt. succinctness" (that's e.g. the reason I move from awk to Python when I need more complex data structures than awk's arrays, which can often do the job, but not without looking ugly). By the way, your "ls * .foo" does not even do the same as "find -name '*.foo'" due to a superfluous space ;-) But the fact that most people don't know about xargs -P (or gnu parallel), or spawn too many processes, or use ugly hacks like pidfiles/start-stop-daemon, is not a reason to throw out all the good stuff shell scripting has to offer.