You found the one exception. There's a fuzzy line when dealing with shell scripts. If you're just iterating over a directory and checking some files, that's g

You found the one exception. There's a fuzzy line when dealing with shell scripts. If you're just iterating over a directory and checking some files, that's great shell script territory. If you're making a launcher script for another program to set the environment, check directories, fix permissions, and run pre-flight checks, that's great for shell script. But, sometimes we end up with feature creep. You start out with "Well, this shell script just has to parse some CSV and insert into sqlite" then before you know it, it also has to check another pre-existing DB for redundancy checks or constraints, then you're 100 pages into the Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide trying to make Bash do something that would be a six liner in Perl 4. The benefits of over-programming bash scripts is extensive portability though (if you make sure you aren't using features only in very late version of the shell).