The issue isn't so much in the medium (shell), but the underlying program itself (sysvinit) being overly primitive. See the daemontools family where runscripts

The issue isn't so much in the medium (shell), but the underlying program itself (sysvinit) being overly primitive. See the daemontools family where runscripts are largely as short or shorter than systemd unit files: http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/run-scripts-and-service-units-side-by-side.html http://homepage.ntlworld.com./jonathan.deboynepollard/FGA/ru... In addition, the BSDs have much shorter rc scripts mainly by putting all the boilerplate functions into a single library file that is then sourced. Gentoo's OpenRC framework, as well.