> What I hope comes out of this is that Linux distributions standardize on a bare-bones shell for system-level and even application-level scripts, and more powe

> What I hope comes out of this is that Linux distributions standardize on a bare-bones shell for system-level and even application-level scripts, and more powerful shells are used only for interactive sessions. It's called POSIX, aka ISO/IEC 9945: http://www.unix.org/version3/iso_std.html