> I use bash, despite its shortcomings for the pure reason of portability. I can rest at night knowing that the next unix machine I use, will almost certainly h

> I use bash, despite its shortcomings for the pure reason of portability. I can rest at night knowing that the next unix machine I use, will almost certainly have bash installed somewhere No, bash isn't standard at all. It's usually installed on Linux, but BSDs and other Unices don't have it installed by default, and not all Linux distros have it either. (Off the top of my head: OpenWRT.) The standard is sh, the bourne shell. It's a pet peeve of mine -- it's really annoying to port things that use bash internally for no reason.